Understanding Color, 5th Edition

GLOSSARY

Acuity

See Visual acuity.

Additive mixture

Color seen as a result of light alone.

Additive primaries

The three wavelengths of light that must be present to yield white light: red, green, and blue.

Admixture

An artist's technique in which a single color is mixed into all (or most) colors in a composition.

Aerial perspective

See Atmospheric perspective.

Afterimage

A “ghost” image that follows stimulation of the eye by a single color when its complement is not present in the field of vision.

Analogous colors

Colors adjacent on a color spectrum, sometimes defined as hues limited to the range between a primary and secondary. A group of colors including any two primaries but never the third.

Aniline dyes

A family of alcohol- and coal tar–based dyes discovered in the 1830s; capable of producing brilliant colors but not as colorfast as the azo dyes that succeeded them.

Applied art

Artwork created to enhance a functional object.

Artists' media

A family of subtractive media that selectively absorb and reflect light; artists' media are composed of a liquid, paste, viscous, solid, or other base into which pigments or dyes have been introduced to form a transferable colorant, such as paint, dye, crayon or chalk.

Artists' primaries

The simplest colors of subtractive media, from which all other colors are derived: red, yellow, and blue.

Artists' spectrum

The full range of visible hues as organized by Goethe: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet; expandable to include ...