Rugs: impact of color

Sir Isaac Newton, in 1666, first separated a ray of light into its component parts by bending or refracting it through a glass prism onto a white screen.

The rays he saw and called the spectrum were red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet. (Other rays, which are too long or too short for the human eye to see, have been discovered and put to use by modern scien­tists.

The X ray, the violet ray, the infrared ray are all part of light.)

The rainbow shows the six visible colors of the spectrum because it is light refracted through rain drops onto the opposite sky. Since Sir Isaac Newton's time, both artists and scientists have made exhaustive studies of color. Several systems of color har­mony have been developed, but the simplest and still most widely used is based on the spectrum of six colors.

Red, yellow and blue are called the "primaries" because in pigments (paints or dyes) they are the three basic colors. Orange, green and violet are called the "secondaries" because each of them is made by mixing two of the primaries. Red and yellow make orange. Blue and red make violet.

Yellow and blue make green. Arrange these six colors in a circle and red will fall opposite green, blue opposite orange, and yellow opposite violet.

A combination of any of these opposites will give you a color harmony because all three primaries are represented.