Teaching Color
Half science, half art. A semester spent on one subject from every direction at once.
Color belongs to nobody. A physicist will tell you it is a wavelength, a chemist that it is what a molecule does with a photon, a biologist that it is three cone cells and a nerve, a psychologist that it does not exist until a brain says so, and a painter that none of this helps at the easel. Each of them is right and none of them is enough.
The course takes color from all of those directions at once and refuses to pick. Half the semester is theory: the physics of light and optics, the chemistry of dyes and pigments, the biology of vision, the psychology of perception, then the theory of color and color spaces, which finally make sense once you know why the rules exist. The other half is studio. Students work across acrylic, oil and watercolor paint, tattoo, resin, and a medium of their own choosing, and finish with a project of their own design.
What students take away is a way of thinking that outlives the subject. They arrive having only ever been taught to see color as a choice from a menu, and leave able to reason about it from the electron up and from the eye down, and to make something with it. Engineers discover that aesthetic decisions have technical content. Designers discover that the technical content is theirs to control.
That is the argument for teaching it this way. Almost nothing worth understanding sits inside one discipline, and color is the most vivid proof of it I know.
Physics of Color
Where color comes from before anything alive is involved. Electromagnetic radiation, wavelength and energy, and the optics of how light gets bent, scattered and split on its way to an eye.
Chemistry of Color
Why a molecule absorbs one wavelength and not another, and how that becomes a material you can hold. Students synthesize dyes and pigments in the lab and take them away in jars.
Biology of Color
Three cone types, one visual system, and a long evolutionary argument about why we see the way we do. Also what other animals see instead, and why.
Theory of Color
Only now do the rules make sense. Harmony, contrast and simultaneous effects, then the geometry of color spaces and why there are so many competing ways to write a color down.
Applying Color
Composition. Spatial effects, balance and proportion, emphasis, unity. Then we go to the art museum with a scavenger hunt and look at how painters have solved the problems the previous eight weeks just named.
Color Materials
Studios in acrylic, oil and watercolor paint, in tattoo, in resin, and in a medium of the student’s own choosing. Most work with commercial materials, but anyone who wants to can use the dyes and pigments they made back in the chemistry unit.
Projects
Everyone presents a final project and an art portfolio. The best of these are things I could not have predicted in week one.
Carson J. Bruns, Associate Professor, ATLAS Institute and the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder.