William Benson

Color Theory

William benson was a 19th c. architect. His work came after the discoveries of Newton.

He wrote “The Principles of Science of Colour, Consisely Stated to Aid and Promote their Useful Application in the Decorative Arts” in 1868 in which he proposes his color theory.

Proposes a theory of color in which there are Three elementary color sensations Red, Green and Blue. The combinations of these sensations lead to an in�nite number of hues and intermediate colors ranging from the most bright tints to the darkest shades.

His goal is “to help the artist devise endless varieties of beautiful arrangement of color”. He stresses the beauty of color throughout his book, and starts his model from the prismic spectrum.

That is why he worked with the two color systems: the additive and subtractive- to be able to translate what we see onto canvases. Bridging the gap between natural light colors and pigment.

The strongest Red, Green and Blue are obtained by throwing together ALL the rays in which these colors predominate and excluding the rest. E.g.: the strongest yellow is a mixture of red and green with exclusion of blue. The color become brighter but paler than while light as a result of this exclusion.

3 bands: Redorangeyellow + Blue = White Bluegreenseagreen + Red= White

William Benson

Prismatic Spectrum

Prismatic rays: Red: least refrangible rays (longest waves) Green: middle band Blue: most refrangible rays (shortest waves)

Those are the closest to what we can describe as Primary colors.These are the ones that “strike the eye” �rst, and all those that lie in between are compound.

Their complematary colors: Seagreen, Pink and Yellow are the closest to what are called secondary colors and should be equal in brightness to the sum of their components, unlike the colors Orange, Green and Purple which are considered to be the secondary colors.

Colors are not UNIFORM in the bands: they change in brightness and hue.

Dark red - Bright scarlet - Orange - Brigter yellow - Yellow Green-Green - Dullish Seagreen-Blue - “that fades away into darkness to a faint tinge of ” Violet “the colors of the last rays thus seeming to tend towards the redness of the �rst”

He aimed to shed what he thought were errors about the approach to color:Complemetary colors as mentionned previously.

He noticed that the BRIGHTNESS of a color is in�uenced by its surrounding hues, a fact taken for granted then.He found that secondary colors found in pigments are dull whereas they should be two times as bright.

That is why he thought of Pink to be more accurate as a color than Violet: “induced me to use the term PINK instead of PURPLE, for the secondary containing RED and BLUE; especially as the colour com-monly understood by the latter contains a great preponderance of BLUE, besides being much too dark.”

William Benson

Color Findings

His color model is based on a cube. He chose to make it stand on its black corner, out of which three colors are extended: Blue, Yellow and Red. The top vertex is white, or full brightness, out of which three other colors extend: Yellow, Yellow Green and Pink.

He named all the colors on his cube, mostly in name pairs to accurately describe the intermediacy of the colors, and where tehy would lie spatially. His model might be the �rst three dimentional color model.

It consists of 13 axes: 3 of which connect the mid point (one primary color changes) of opposing are called primary, 6 of which connect the midpoints of opposing edges (2 primary colors change) called secondary, and 4 axes that connect opposing corners, called tertiary.

William Benson

Color Model

Mental e�ects of colors; uses adjectives to describe colors such as “lively, cheerful, warm” for redRefreshing, Gentle, Soft for GreenQuiet, sober, retiring and sober for Blue.

He attributes this to the same e�ect: that Red is more “exhilirating” than Green, and Green more than blue, and that is due to the length of the waves of these colors (from longest to shortest) and draws an interesting parallel with musical pitch.

Bright colors lose depth of color when their intensity increases for example Red’s brightness increases faster than its “redness”.Our perception of colors is a�ected by lighting, bright colors look duller in dim lights than dark colors, and dark colors look darker in bright lights than bright colors.Brightness and depth are inversely related.

William Benson

Color Quality

He discusses what he calls the three qualities of color:

Brightness Depth: the ratio of its richness (strength of hue) to its brightness Clearness: ratio of its richness to its darkness

William Benson

Color Theory

William Benson

Color Theory