Simultaneous Contrast
PERCEIVING COLOURS:
Colour Interactions
Explore the effects of neighbouring colours
Details:
All ages
Time: 15 minutes
Learning Outcome: Recognize that the immediate surroundings of an area affect how you perceive its colour.
Colour Concepts: Colour is contextual. The colour of neighbouring areas can affect how you perceive a colour.
Materials:
Scissors
Crayon (or marker, or pencil crayon - something to colour in a space)
Instructions:
Choose one coloured crayon (or pencil crayon etc.). If you did the Munker-White exercise – choose the same colour.
Fill in the central squares within the large white and black rectangles and also fill in the rectangle at the bottom with the same colour of crayon. Make the colour as opaque as you can.
Cut out and place the rectangle so it connects the two central squares. This will help you verify that the coloured square areas match.
Remove the rectangle. Describe the shift in the perceived colour of the two central squares.
Vocabulary:
Questions & observations:
What happens when the same object is viewed on the two different backgrounds?
Were the results as you expected? Why?
More to explore:
Repeat the exercise using different coloured crayons. Compare whether the effect is stronger with vivid, pale, muted or dark coloured crayons. Also try grey coloured crayons.
Repeat the exercise using different coloured backgrounds. A coloured background version is available in the CLP Handout - Simultaneous Contrast
Create your own variations of Simultaneous contrast. See the glossary definition for examples.
What’s going on?
Colour is a perceptual experience, and the coloured objects we see in the world are never viewed in isolation. In Simultaneous Contrast, the colours of the neighbouring areas impact the colour we perceive. Note that all attributes of a colour can shift (i.e. its hue, lightness/value and chroma). Students should be encouraged to describe shifts in any and all of the attributes. Students should notice that the muted colours tend to produce the most obvious perceptual shifts.
Factors that affect our perception of colours are complicated! In any given context, an object is perceived as having a colour belonging to it, called an object colour. This object colour tends to remain relatively constant in varying contexts, and so we generally perceive it to be a fixed, inherent property of the object. However, this constancy of object colours is not perfect.
Although this illusion seems like the same illusion as the Munker-White Illusion, it is not. See the simultaneous contrast discussion in the glossary for a visual example.
Find out more:
See discussion: Colour is contextual
See presentation by David Briggs on Colours of Objects and Colours of Illumination in Colour Literacy Forum #8
