Colour

Abstract

Colour is a part of our lives as it sustains our survival in many ways. We are familiar with many phenomena of colour vision even though they might still seem mysterious. We have all marvelled at the rainbow, mixed coloured pigments to produce new combinations, and observed the changing appearance of objects under different lighting conditions. Until the seventeenth century artists were practitioners of colour vision, but thereafter scientists have tried to understand it. Visual artists have been experimenting with colour for much longer than visual scientists, and so it is natural that the practical skills the painters had learned by trial and error should have had an influence on ideas about the nature of colour vision. They appreciated the influence of one colour on others as well as the colour illusions that could be represented and controlled. The range of colour illusions has been greatly extended by visual scientists and many examples will be presented.