Introduction

At the moment, this site, and the applets within it, are best viewed with Internet Explorer 4.0. Efforts are being made to try to make the Java applets accessable by other browsers on all major operating platforms, but for now we reccommend only IE 4.0 on either a Windows or a UNIX system.

This site contains information about both electronic and pigment-based color theory. Emphasis is placed on exploratory exercises that allow the user to discover for themselves the theories and ideas introduced in each section.

This site is intended for the visual or graphic art student interested in color theory. It has been designed for professor Roger Mayer at Brown University, to be used in his Studio Foundation course, and it was created as a project for Computer Science 92: Educational Software, also at Brown University.

If this is your first time to the site, we recommend that you use the navigation arrows at the bottom of each page to travel through the site. The outline on the left contains only a breakdown of the main ideas of the site, but does not contain a link to every page within the site. This was done to make sure certain pages are read before others, thus ensuring you have been introduced to the concepts before you reach the exercises.

The contents of the site can be broken down into four main sections:

• Electronic Color: A short introduction to electronic color and its differences from pigment-based color.
  
• Color Models: A brief overview of the history of color models, both pigment-based and electronic, and an application of two of the electronic models.
  
• Color Mixing: An introduction to Goethe and his color triangle, and an application using his triangle to experiment with different color mixing.
  
• Color Contrast: An introduction to the ideas of Johannes Itten and Joseph Albers, and an application of several of Albers exercises.
  

Color Tree

Electronic Color