gray or grey - Like: People who prefer this most neutral of all shades are carefully neutral about life. You like to protect yourself from the hectic world, wrapping yourself with the security blanket of a noncommittal color. You prefer a secure, safe, balanced existence, and so unlike the reds in life, you never crave real excitement, just contentment. It is important for you to maintain the status quo. You have often made compromises in your lifestyles. You are practical and calm and do not like to attract attention. You are willing to work hard (the grey flannel suit) and to be of service. You are the middle-of-the-road type, cool, conservative, composed and reliable.

Dislike: To dislike grey is to dislike neutrality. You would rather be right or wrong, but never indifferent. Routine bores you. You look for a richer, fuller life. This may lead you to get into one involvement, hobby, or interest after another in the pursuit of happiness. Grey may mean eerie ghosts, ashes, cobwebs, and the dust of a haunted house, or other scary grey things.

Produced when light strikes an object and then reflects back to the eyes.

An element of art with three properties: (1) hue or tint, the color name, e.g., red, yellow, blue, etc.: (2) intensity, the purity and strength of a color, e.g., bright red or dull red; and (3) value, the lightness or darkness of a color.

When the spectrum is organized as a color wheel, the colors are divided into groups called primary, secondary and intermediate (or tertiary) colors; and also as warm and cool colors.

Colors can be objectively described as saturated, clear, cool, warm, subdued, grayed, tawny, mat, glossy, monochrome, multicolored, particolored, variegated, or polychromed.

Some words used to describe colors are more subjective (subject to personal opinion or taste), such as: exciting, sweet, saccharine, brash, garish, ugly, beautiful, cute, pretty, and sublime.

Sometimes people speak of colors when they are actually refering to pigments, what they are made of (various natural or synthetic substances), their relative permanence, etc.

Photographers measure color temperature in degrees kelvin (K).

"Gray" is the American spelling. "Grey" is the British spelling.

• "I make black and white prints because I want to go back to the beginning, and because in prints black and white are absolute: these two colors express the most delicate vibration, the most profound tranquillity, and unlimited profundity."
  Shiko Munakata (1903-1975), Japanese.
  
  
• "Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid."
  Jules Feiffer, contemporary American cartoonist and writer.
  

• "Chalkboard" on color theory, painting materials and techniques. With excellent text and graphics, several pages thoroughly explain various aspects of color, along with color mixing with pigments, light, and optics. Chalkboard comes from Ralph Larmann at the University of Evansville, IN.

Also see CMYK, local color, monochrome, palette, Pantone Matching System (PMS), pattern, pigment, RGB, saturation, spectrum, texture, and value.

Coming soon (available now only in early stages of construction): articles on individual colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, purple, brown, white, gray, and black.

https://inform.quest/_art