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Color Physics @Hampshire, Day 11
Day 11 was more or less a rehash of the second half of Day 10, but in more depth and with more contact points with the visual arts.
The topics covered were:
- Infrared and ultraviolet photography.
- Metamers.
- Missing complementary pairs of spectral colors.
- Three types of additive color mixing and its applications:
- Direct addition of lights (TV monitors and projections on white surfaces in stage design).
- Partitive mixing and pointillism in painting (Seurat, Signac, and van Gogh).
A self portrait of van Gogh’s as an example of the pointillist painting technique which relies on the principle of additive color mixing. - Mixing light “in time” with Newton’s disks, which students made for a homework assignment a few weeks ago.
Finally, we formally introduced subtractive mixing with filters and the transmittance graphs. Students then used diffraction gratings to break up the light from a tungsten lamp, observed which colors were absorbed by various filters, and sketched the transmittance graphs for those filters.
A student observing the color spectrum generated by a diffraction grating after the light has passed through a filter. Other interesting resources:
- Andrew Davidhazy, Overview of Infrared and Ultraviolet Photography, School of Photographic Arts and Sciences Rochester Institute of Technology. Accessed March 11, 2017.
- J. Kirby, K. Stonor, A. Roy, A. Burnstock, R. Grout and R. White. “Seurat’s Painting Practice: Theory, Development and Technology.” National Gallery Technical Bulletin, vol. 24, 2003.
- More pointillist painters on artsy.net