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CHROMATISM, A New COLOR PERSPECTIVE
for Artists.
Close your eyes and run your hand over a painting. You'll find it to be FLAT . But when you open your eyes, certain colors in the painting appear to advance or recede. Our hand proved the advance-recede effect of color does not exist. But our eye SAW the effect. Seeing is believing. Our eye proved the effect to be optical, but more to the point, an OPTICAL ILLUSION! An optical illusion of depth.....where depth does not exist!
The important question for artists is, "What causes the optical illusion that colors in a painting appear to advance or recede?" Artists cannot fully control the application of colors for depth without first understanding the optical behavior of color and the basis in simple physics that is responsible for the optical illusion.
The Theory of RAINBOW PERSPECTIVE, (also called Spectrum Perspective, Color Wheel Perspective and Prismatic Color Perspective), developed in 1996 by artist John R. I. Miller, answers in simple terms the question, "What causes the OPTICAL ILLUSION that colors in a painting advance or recede?"
All artists are familiar with complementary colors. Since the 14th century artists have recognized and used the recession exhibited by complementary pairs of color.
Green recedes from Red,
Blue recedes from Orange,
and Violet recedes from Yellow.
Don't lose sight of that fact as we not only build on that color relationship, but also determine it's simple scientific basis.
When complementary colors take their place in the spectrum, recession is seen to take place from red all across the spectrum to violet.
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