Page:Elementary Color (IA gri c00033125012656167).djvu/62

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52
PRACTICAL EXPERIMENTS.

when added together to fill the entire circle of 100 parts, blue will contain 38.3 parts and green, 61.7 parts, as shown in Fig. 13, and the disks when rotated will give the color which is the complementary of red: namely, a blue green.

In the same way the complementary of each of the other standard colors, and in fact of any color, may be obtained.

The complementary of orange is another color between the green and blue, but more largely blue. The complementary of green is a violet red, and of violet a color between yellow and green, while yellow and blue are very nearly complementary to each other.

These figures furnish the results in a very well-lighted room, with a perfectly white interior. It is a well-established fact that this experiment is somewhat affected by the degrees of illumination, and also that colored light from the walls and ceiling of a room must of necessity have its effect, but all these matters are so insignificant as to be of no material consequence in the aesthetic study of the subject, and they can be very nearly eliminated when necessary by a careful selection of conditions. Whenever accurate experiments in pigmentary color comparisons are to be made, either by the use of rotating disks or otherwise, it is desirable to have a very well-lighted room, with a northern exposure and to select a morning or noonday light from a slightly overcast sky. These conditions obviate the unpleasant effect of direct sunlight in the room and also the very slightly blue effect of the clear sky. These precautions are unnecessary in experiments relating to the ordinary aesthetic consideration of color combinations, but even in such work it is important to exclude all light reflected from neighboring trees or colored buildings. Also the interior of the room should be as free from color as possible; a clean white surface is especially desirable.

A Chart of Complementary Colors, shown in Fig. 14, has been found very valuable in fixing in the minds of teacher and pupils the complementaries of the six standards. In this chart,