The Material Color Wheel

When we mix pigments on a palette, we will end up with a black color if we add more and more pigments in. It is known as subtractive color mixing. And you will ask what is the additive color mixing? It is for the light. With a prism, you can create a rainbow of colors from the light, and with another prism, all the colors are added back into a white light. In this story, I'm exloring the subtractive color mixing with color wheel.

A color wheel arranges colors in a circle, traditionally organizing the three primary colors (red, yellow, blue) with secondary and tertiary colors blended between them. It is a tool to explore the definition of colors.

Hues and Cues is a board game designed for people who are interested in color. In the game, the cue giver will draw a card, choose a color and try to describe the color with one or two words. Other players need to guess what the color is on a board with 480 colors. The cue giver cannot use the color name, such as pink, so it deliberately avoids a technical color notation in gameplay, but encourages an intuitive descripton of the color. Despite its designer, Scott Brady's two-decade background in specialty printing and color-matching systems, the game employs natural language and perceptual color communication rather than technical color theory.

But how can we imply a color in the board with just a few words? And everyone knows what that color is? The concept of the true name is explored in the novel「A Wizard of Earthsea」by Ursula K. Le Guin. There is a creature known as the shadow that if you don't know its name, you can not defeat it. In order to win the game of Hues and Cues, we also need to attach a name to each color. So in the next chapter, we want to explore if we can give each color a name, where this name derives from the history, arises from a material, and is perceived in our linguistic consensus.

「The Secret Lives of Colour」by Kassia St Clair explores the physical, historical, and cultural origins of colors through their material sources — from crushed insects for carmine red to ground lapis lazuli for ultramarine blue. Unlike the abstract digital world of HSL values where colors exist as pure mathematical coordinates, St Clair reveals how each pigment has a tangible story rooted in geography, chemistry, and human labor. The book demonstrates that colors aren't just visual experiences but material substances with weight, texture, and scarcity — harvested, mined, synthesized, and traded across centuries. Where a screen displays hsl(358, 62%, 38%) with a click, St Clair shows us the alchemists, miners, and merchants who risked their lives to create that same red such as cochineal.

In her beautiful book, colors are grouped into 10 balls in the front page, from white to black, each of which looks like a precious stone or a far-away planet in the galaxy. Below we create something similar, and each group contains all the color blobs swimming inside. You can hover over each color under the name list to see if you can spot them in the pool.

It is a mind-opening experience of reading this book. You realize that there were indigo farmers who grew the plants, and workers were involved to ferment and bake the dye into cakes, traders risked their lives in sinking ships to bring the cakes back home. These nameless people's effort made such a color valuable, and people who can afford such colors attached a symbol of status or a sense of beauty to the color.

Back to our main track, can we map the material colors from「The Secret Lives of Colour」onto the conceptual color names in Hues and Cues?

First, we need an imaginary map to let these 75 colors reside in a cell. So we can walk the map like in a city, and find each color living in its own building. It is easier for us to remember streets and directions we turn left and right, rather than a blob ordered as number 5 in a sequence. It makes me think of Mondrian's "New York City" or "Broadway Boogie-Woogie". Let's do that!

In Hues and Cues, the blue-green color occupies the most positions, whereas in「The Secret Lives of Colour」, the color red has the most matches in these positions with the names such as rosso corsa, cochineal and scarlet. It makes me wonder if blue is so dominant in our perception, why can't we name most of them?

According to Samer Hattar and David Berson's study, everyone, even the blinded, is sensitive to blue light, which comes with the earliest daylight at the break of dawn. It sets our internal clock, and that's why scrolling the cellphone at bedtime during night will impact our sleep. If we are prone to seeing blue, why can we barely name it?

William Gladstone, who was a British prime minister, studied the colors used in the book「The Odyssey」by Homer. He found out that colors are seldom named in the book, and blue was not mentioned once. Homer used the word "wine-dark" to refer to the sea, which we will find odd today. Are people in the past color-blind? A later study「Basic Color Terms」by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay shows that color names developed gradually. First developed were black and white, then it came red. Afterwards we found green or yellow, then at a later stage came blue. So maybe Homer was not color-blinded, but he just could not name the color blue at that time.

Asides from the development of color terms, blue is also a rare pigment in nature. In order to obtain blue, people turned to rare minerals like lapis lazuli for ultramarine or laboriously extracted indigo from plants. The difficulty of creating blue — both chemically in nature and historically for human use — makes it perhaps the most elusive of all colors: omnipresent in our visual experience yet vanishingly scarce as actual matter.