Color

Glossary Term: Color
Color (hue) is one of the elements of art. Artists use color in many different ways.

The colors we see are lightwaves absorbed or reflected by everything around us. In nature, a rainbow is white light that is broken apart by the moisture in the air.

People discovered that white light can be broken apart using tools like prisms or this spectroscope.

The colors of the visible light spectrum are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.

White light consists of all of the colors mixed together. The color of an object depends on how it absorbs and/or reflects light. If an object absorbs all of the light wavelengths, it will appear black. If it reflects all of them, it will appear white. If an object absorbs all wavelengths except red, for example, it will look red.

Artists have invented many different media that imitate the colors of light. Painters, for example, use powdered pigments to reproduce the colors of the rainbow.