Visual Language - Colour Theory

This week's 'Visual Language' session had us looking at colour theory. We were asked to bring in 10 objects of a certain colour each. My colour was orange, I tried to bring in as wide a variation of objects of different oranges as i could (ranging from an orange itself... to a rubber chicken).
We were then put into colour groups and asked to collectively categorize our objects in any way which we thought appropriate. We decided on going from light/transparent to dark/opaque... following through to objects with a gradient of orange tones. This was quite a simple way to go about it.. but it was effective nonetheless.

This is a video showing our range of objects..
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We were then asked (again collectively, in colour groups) to identify 10 objects of which we felt had the strongest range in colours. We then had to match-up these objects to the closest colour on the pantone spectrum that we could find.
This was very interesting as we established that colour really is relative. Different surroundings, different lighting and different textures all alter the colour... therefore finding the pantone codes for 3D objects difficult as, even with the space between the different people helping (light hitting the same object in different ways) we found it hard to agree on one specific code.
These are our results...flyer -
Coated Euro
151EC
C M Y K
0 64 100 0

golf ball -
Solid Coated
Pantone 151C
12pts pantone yellow 750
4pts pantone warm red 250
card star -
Solid Matte
Pantone 804m
two-tone shoelace -
Solid Coated
Pantone 145C
14pts Pantone Yellow 86.2
2pts Pantone Ruby Red 12.3
1/4pt Pantone Black 1.5
tin gingerbread man -
Coated Euro
1385C
R212 G118 B0
HTML D47600
tic-tac -
Solid Coated
Pantone 1665c
10pts Pantone Warm Red 61.6
6pts Pantone Yellow 36.9
1/4 pt Pantone Black 1.5
piece of chalk -
Uncoated Euro
Pantone DE 22.5 0
C M Y K
0 20 50 0
orange (fruit) -
Solid Coated
Pantone 137c
14pts Pantone Yellow 87.5
2pts Pantone Warm Red 12.5

plastic spoon -
Solid Coated
Pantone 1665c
wristband -
Solid Matte
Pantone 805m

Alongside these tasks we were taught a brief outline into colour theory. Learning about the differences and similarites of CMYK and RGB and how the mixing of the colours works. The primary, secondary and tertiary colours, all by using the colour wheel and different variations of it.
We learned a lot of terms I was unsure with using in the past... such as hue, saturation and tone.


This week really opened my eyes to the complexity of colour. I had never really thought about it that deeply and it turns out it really interests me as it is something I really know very little about and have clearly made mistakes in in the past.