Colour Magic

Days, Metals, Planets

How seven spheres, and seven days, and seven earthy metals,
Their colours wind in endless maze, until all motion settles.

Colours

The different sections in the Ink Amera web site are colour coded using selected shades or tints of twelve colours along with four shades of grey. The twelve colours comprise the three most important colours (red, green and blue), their opposites (cyan, magenta and yellow), and the six colours inbetween. Seven colours from this selection, the three principal colours and their opposites, along with black, have long been associated with the 7 Days of the week, the 7 Metals known to the ancients, and the 7 Planets which can be seen with the naked eye. The last set includes the Sun and the Moon since both are heavenly bodies which are observed to move independently against the backdrop of the stars. Before we see how this association works we need to be clear about some very simple technicalities of colour.

The most important point is that colours can be looked at in two ways. The first is one familiar to all who ever painted a picture in school. It is the mixing of pigments such as paints or dyes. The second way is the mixing of light as happens on the television screen or computer monitor. The effects of mixing coloured lights are entirely different to those of mixing pigments.

Black is the absence of colour and, indeed, of any light at all. Because of this, it should not, strictly speaking, be called a colour but it usually is - just to make life easier. White is the opposite of black and is the presence of all colours. White, like black is not, strictly speaking, a colour but, again like black, everyone calls it a colour. The colours which make up white may be those normally associated with the spectrum and the rainbow (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet) but white light can also be formed by mixing the three primary colours (red, green and blue). Our ability to see in colour results from having three types of colour receptor cells in our eyes which respond individually to red, green or blue light. Objects appear white to us because they are reflecting light of all three primary colours.

Since white is composed of red, green and blue, it follows that when one of these three components is missing, the combination of the remaining two must produce an entirely different colour. Remove green from white and we are left with a mixture of red and blue which most people would call purple. The standard name for the purest form of this colour is magenta. Similarly, a mix of red and green produces yellow, and green mixed only with blue produces a colour which might be called turquoise by some but has the standard name cyan for its purest form. Cyan, magenta and yellow are the secondary colours.

Because a secondary colour is composed of two primary colours, we can simply add the missing primary colour to it to make white. The two - primary and secondary - are termed complementary. Red and cyan are complements, as are green and magenta, and blue and yellow. Another way to view this phenomenon is to regard each secondary colour as the negative of its complementary primary positive (or vice versa), especially in colour photography where positive prints are obtained from colour negatives.

The pure colours might be clear against a black background in the illustrations but they are generally too garish to use as text colours. Pure yellow text is almost impossible to read. From here on the muted set of colours which David and Chris find pleasing will be used.

Computers

The most common method of representing colour in computers is to assign a number of bits (binary digits, each of which can be '0' or '1') to each of the three primary colours. The current standard for most applications is for each primary component to have 8 bits representing a range of values from 0 (black) to 255 (pure colour). With nearly 17 million different colours available by this method, it is not usual to think of every colour by its 24-bit number but to think of the three components as separate 8-bit values.

The minimum number of bits that can represent colour by its primary components is, of course, three: one each for red, green and blue. This system was one of the first to be used in the earliest colour computers since it can represent not only the three primary colours but also the three secondary colours as well as black and white. In this case, it is usual to refer to the colour by the 3-bit value ranging from 0 (binary 000) to 7 (binary 111).

3-bit colour representation shows clearly how two primary colours may be added to produce a secondary colour (e.g. blue 1 + green 2 = cyan 3), or that adding a primary colour to its complementary secondary colour will produce white (e.g. red 4 + cyan 3 = white 7).

When the 3-bit colours are laid out in numerical sequence, as in the table above, a simple but very important pattern can easily be seen. The set of three primary colours and the set of three secondary colours are each split into an adjacent pair with the third offset and cross-linked with its complement. This is a completely natural pattern resulting from the way that binary numbers work (i.e. each next higher bit has double the value of the previous bit) and would not normally be considered in any way significant, except... if we find the same pattern occurring in the natural world, we assume that it probably results from a fundamental binary structure.

Planets

Quite surprisingly, exactly the same pattern of interlinked threes occurs in the colours long associated with the astrological sequence of the seven planets (which includes the Sun - seen from the Earth as a 'wandering star' like the other planets). It is not exactly the same as the computer 3-bit colour sequence since the interlinked primary and secondary colours are not complementary. Instead, it is as though the secondary colours had been rotated by one place.

The sequence, known from Babylonian times or earlier, is based on their observed periods, in days or years, rather than their position in the solar system. Historically, the colour associated with the Moon has been white but this can be explained by the Moon's connection with black Saturn, which orbits the sun in as many years as there are days in a lunar month. Both have watery connections in astrology and myth. The pattern of interlinked threes shows clearly that cyan is its real, long hidden, colour.

Metals

For untold thousands of years, the planets and their colours have been associated with a set of metals - the only elements known until quite recently. Looping around the astrological sequence of planets, take every 5th colour and place it in a new sequence until all seven have been copied. The newly formed sequence is the order of the seven associated metals as they appear in the periodic table of elements. Once again, the new sequence displays the pattern of interlinked threes (or 'triads') although now the primary set and secondary set have exchanged places.

The fact that the set ranges from iron to lead is interesting. Iron, the first and lightest of the sequence, is the heaviest element formed by nuclear fusion within a star. All heavier elements are formed when a star explodes. Lead, the last and heaviest of the sequence, is the stable end result of naturally occurring, non catastrophic, nuclear fission in several important decay sequences of heavier radioactive elements.

Days

The planets and their colours are also associated with the days in the week and are the basis of the biblical account of Creation in Genesis. Looping around the periodic table sequence of metals, take every 5th colour and place it in a new sequence until all seven have been copied.

The newly formed sequence is the order of the seven days in the week. Again, the pattern of interlinked triads is preserved with primary and secondary sets once more exchanged. As with the other two sequences, the interlinked colours are not complementary but the secondary colours appear to have been rotated.

Reverse Sequences

If the process is repeated, three more sequences are produced. The sequences of the six colours are the same as the first three hexadic sequences but in reverse order, with black - as Saturn, Lead or Saturday - still taking seventh place as the element of Repose (or Death). The reverse sequences still preserve the pattern of interlinked triads.

The following colour blocks link to pages about the individual colours.

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