The primary objective for the Colour Literacy Project is to develop foundational resources for teachers of all educational levels, with a “top-down/bottom-up” approach, simultaneously addressing colour education upwards from preschool, and downwards from post-secondary levels. We recognize the need for a multi-disciplinary, overarching framework that connects colour with many subjects – science, history, math, geography, language, dance. Colour literacy is not just for artists, it’s for everyone.

With the daily inundation of colourful images, videos and advertisements, we are now historically at an opportune moment where digital technology has exploded and become an integral element of our culture. Colour literacy, which combines science literacy with visual literacy, is now critical to navigate in a world in which colour is so accessible.

Colour surrounds us. It is a visual language that affects how we feel and how we interact with the world around us. It helps us communicate and engage with our surroundings. Although colour is ubiquitous, and plays a critical role in the way we understand and shape the world, much of what most people know about colour is outdated, over-simplified, and full of misconceptions.

The seeds for the Colour Literacy Project began at the Munsell Centennial Color Symposium held in Boston, 2018, where many people voiced their concerns over the current state of colour education. Colour is playing an ever-diminishing role in art and design education worldwide.  Much of colour education still revolves around curricula developed in the 1960s or earlier, which has been over-simplified, removed from its context and transformed into a reductive (and somewhat stale) theoretical framework of knowledge. What has been lost is a colour education which fosters a desire to investigate and explore colour, in all its complexity and nuance (and messiness).

This over-simplification of colour education has contributed to many misconceptions about colour, widespread amongst artists and designers, as well as the general public. What is very often taught and published today as "foundational colour knowledge" generally rests on: 1) How red, blue and yellow- or cyan, magenta and yellow - coloured paints mix; and 2) The misconception that there are only seven colours in the spectrum or rainbow. Colour is so much more.

The Colour Literacy Project presents a new way to teach colour. Rather than starting with the ubiquitous mixing of the three (so-called) ‘primaries’, red, blue and yellow, we start learning about colour by learning to notice and describe colour variations.

Look around and observe the colours around you. If you are inside, look at your wall. It is probably painted a solid colour, but how many variations of that colour do you see? How do shadows change what you see? How does your distance from the wall change the colour you see? Does the colour appear the same on the wall with the window as on the wall opposite the window? Does the colour of the walls appear the same when the sun is shining brightly outside and when it is raining? Does they appear the same before and after you illuminate your walls with LED lights? What about that tree outside in the summer– many of its leaves may appear green, but how many variations of green do you see? How can you describe those variations? If you look at the same tree in an hour or two, are the greens the same? This is where we start: by noticing, by describing and by recognizing that the colours we see very much depend on their context. These ideas are foundational, yet they are often overlooked within a traditional colour education.

Colour exercises provide an experience-based approach that emphasizes looking and describing colour experiences for building foundational colour knowledge. We add the spirit of investigation and continue to encourage free play to stimulate creativity and critical thinking.

While some basic coverage of colour perception occurs in middle and high school science classes, the bulk of colour-related education –– from elementary through high school –– has focused on using coloured media in art classes, particularly within the context of mixing paints. But the phenomenon of colour plays an important role in so many areas of our lives, from the clothes we wear and the products we buy, to the environment we inhabit and the colourful digital images that surround us every day on our devices.

For these reasons, colour is an ideal umbrella topic to study across disciplines. 21st century colour education embraces a balanced, cross-curricular approach that weaves together knowledge and experiences from the arts and the sciences, and expands into other subject areas including language arts and the social sciences. Though each subject views the world through a specific lens, all these disciplines share important commonalities such as observing, documenting, experimenting, drawing conclusions, and solving problems.

By approaching colour from multiple perspectives and integrating experiences based on different ways of knowing, students gain opportunities to deepen and widen their knowledge base, enhance their critical thinking and expand their worldviews.

“Interdisciplinary instruction … helps students identify insights from a range of disciplines that contribute to an understanding of the issue under consideration, and ... develop the ability to integrate concepts and ideas from these disciplines into a broader conceptual framework of analysis."

— Carlton University

See: Why teach with an interdisciplinary approach?

The foundational series of colour exercises designed by the Colour Literacy Project focuses first on seeing and describing colours – in all of their wonderful variations. In our Level One Eye-Opener Exercises, we see straightaway that colour is contextual, and learn how to sort and arrange colours, while recognizing that organizing colours is best done 3-dimensionally. Many misconceptions about the nature of colour arise when we only consider colour’s behaviour within the context of mixing paints.

To understand mixing, we need understand that there are different types of mixing processes, and different media can be mixed using each type of process. The process, the specific media used and even the brand of media used all impact the final result. We can notice and describe these colour differences using the language and skills developed in earlier Eye Opener exercises.

At the end of Level One, we explore colour mixing within a comparative framework. It is important to recognize that we do not mix colour, rather we mix coloured media. We perceive various colours, as our visual system absorbs and interprets light distributions which enter our eyes. In each type of mixing process, the media interact with light in slightly different ways. This means that the light which is sent to our eye depends both on the mixing process and on the specific medium used. Thus the perceived colour of a mixture depends both on the process and the medium.

By exploring colour in a variety of media, using various processes and approaches for mixing, we broaden our scope of understanding colour and the behaviour of coloured media. Ultimately, mixing exercises can expand our ability to see the relationships between colours and then use colour and coloured media in a more informed way. 

One of the most common starting points for the study of colour is the construction of a painted ‘colour wheel’ or ‘hue circle’.  

Instead of beginning colour studies with the traditional 2-dimensional colour wheel, we recommend beginning with a 3-dimensional framework for organizing and describing colours. Introducing the concept of hue planes and building basic 3D colour models at an early stage provides a comprehensive foundation for 21st century colour knowledge.

Our starting point for exploring and expanding the way we experience colour in our world begins with looking, seeing and describing colour in all its variations. We begin by adding adjectives such as vivid, muted, pale and dark to the hue names.

Colour is complex, and our relationship to colour is filtered by our culture, our experiences and our memories. By reducing our means of dealing with colour to a two-dimensional circle of the most vivid hues, we are missing out on all the nuanced variations which inform how we see and communicate with our world.

The term ‘colour wheel’ suffers from a common misconception: equating the terms colour and hue. Hue is one of the dimensions or attributes of a colour, and is not synonymous with the term colour. A related misconception is that ‘black is not a colour’. Understanding the 3-dimensional nature of colour attributes allows us to correct this misconception. Blacks, whites and grays are all colours: they just lack the attributes of hue and chroma. The ability to describe colour with all its attributes – like hue, lightness/value and chroma – at an early stage of studying colour, ultimately gives us a firmer grasp on understanding our visual world.

Another problem with colour wheels is that there are so many different types. Which one is the ‘best’? Which one is ‘correct’? Using only three so-called ‘primary’ paint colours to mix all others is actually a misconception. The physicality of the paint-mixing process means that it is impossible to produce ‘all’ colours from a limited set of three.

Each set of three primary paint colours – whether it is comprised of is red, yellow and blue, or cyan, magenta and yellow coloured paints, will result in a different set of mixed paint colours. Even the choice of a specific paint colour – whether it is a cadmium red light or a naphthol red, or from different manufacturers - will result in a different set of mixed colours.

Understanding that there is no ‘true’ or ’correct’ colour wheel requires a deep understanding of the way colour works. Colours are what we perceive when we receive light into our eye: our human visual system constructs the particular colour we see, taking the overall context into account. This is an extremely complex process. By working with a painted colour wheel, we are focusing on colorants, and the way they behave and interact with each other. Colorants, or coloured media, are not the same as colours. Using the colour wheel with all its ‘relationships’ as the guiding principle for how colour works, and what colour is, is overly limiting. 

Bottom Line: A colour wheel with its associated colour ‘relationships’ both restricts and redacts what colour actually is. When we start to study colour by learning the terminology of ‘Traditional Colour Theory’ – like primary, secondary, tertiary, complementary – colour becomes housed within a conceptual framework. When we start with exploring the three-dimensions of colour, we have a fuller understanding of the relationships of colour to each other.

Take a moment to look at your surroundings. What do you see? A colourful blanket on your couch. A pale blue sky with grey clouds. Your striped cat jumping on the burnished oak table. A white car splashed with mud driving by. All of the information about the shapes, sizes, colours, and motions of objects comes to us via light.

To make sense of all the information entering our eyes, from every location within our visual field, at every moment, our visual system does the remarkable feat of decoding and interpreting all of the light beams which enter our eyes, every fraction of a second. The ability to perceive in colour helps us understand our world visually, as it gives us information about the distribution of light entering our eyes. Colour helps us identify what we are seeing, allows us to discern boundaries between different objects, and can provide important immediate information about our environment like signalling danger.

Multiple factors affect how we see colour. Understanding how we see in colour is a complex and multi-faceted topic, which is not fully understood. Nonetheless there are a few key concepts which are fundamental for understanding colour perception, and are an important part of colour education foundations. First of all, to see colour, we need light. This source of light can: 1) enter our eyes directly; 2) illuminate objects in a scene and then reflect to our eyes; or 3) be transmitted through a transparent filter like a stained-glass window. Secondly, when we see coloured objects, they interact with the illuminating light beams in a variety of ways, and change the characteristics of light which ultimately enters our eyes. Finally, to see colour, we need ourselves, with our eyes, brain, and all their neurological connections.

In the Eye opener exercises, we experience how the lighting conditions, surrounding colours and spatial context all play a role in how we perceive colours. These may be considered external contexts. We also contextualize colour internally, and less tangibly, with our memories, past experiences, emotional states, cultural backgrounds and languages. All of these factors play a role in colour perception, and contribute to its dynamic nature.

See the Colour Fundamental: Colour is a Perception

You may have students in your class who do not have full colour vision. They may have limited colour vision or ‘colour vision deficiency’ – those terms are preferred to the more common term ‘colour blindness’(which may incorrectly infer that a person does not see colour at all). Limited colour vision can vary in type and severity. Those with limited colour vision will most likely not be able to distinguish all 45 tiles in the sorting set and will instead see some of these as having the same colour. The sorting exercises can be adapted for each student’s chromatic palette.

Free Sort and Separating Chromatic from Achromatic Colours can be done without modifications. You may find that these students see more achromatic or muted colours, depending on the type and severity of their limited colour vision.

Arranging Coloured Tiles in Hue Families can be done with the hues these students are able to distinguish. Have the students first sort the chromatic from the achromatic colours, and work with the subset of coloured tiles that they can distinguish. Some tiles may appear as the same colour to these students; the tiles that appear the same or similar will depend on the type and severity of their limited colour vision.

Arranging Coloured Tiles in Groups of the Same Character can likely be done without modifications, although the students may find the pale and muted versions of some hues to appear the same or similar.

Spacing Between Hue Families may be performed after first removing the tiles they see as achromatic from their set. Depending on the type and severity of their limited colour vision, the student may arrange the tiles with different spacings from those with full colour vision.

For the Lightness/value and Chroma exercise, after establishing the greyscale with achromatic colours, the student may prefer to work with all the remaining tiles and sort by lightness/value, and omit the sorting by chroma.

The Arranging Coloured Tiles in Hue Sequence exercise may be performed after first removing the tiles they see as achromatic from their set.

For more information:

• See What is Limited Colour Vision? and listed references.

• See the common misconception corrected: PEOPLE WHO ARE COLOUR BLIND SEE THE WORLD IN BLACK AND WHITE