white - Like: White is cleanliness and purity, and those who prefer white are neat and immaculate in their clothing and homes. You are inclined to be a cautious buyer and shrewd trader, but critical and fussy. If you got a spot on your tie or scarf in a restaurant, you would summon a glass of water immediately to clean it off. White also signifies a self-sufficient person and, occasionally, innocence. It is a recall of youth and simplicity.

Dislike: Since white represents cleanliness and purity, to dislike white does not exactly mean that you are a messy person, but it does mean that you have never been obsessed with order. You are not very fussy. Things that are a little off-center are much more interesting to you than those that are perfectly in line. A little dust on the shelves or on yourself doesn't throw you into a spasm of cleaning. You are not very uptight and are easy to be with. You may see white as sterile and connect it with nurses' uniforms, doctors, and worst of all (for many people) dentists.

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).

• "Blue is the male principle, stern and spiritual. Yellow the female principle, gentle, cheerful and sensual. Red is matter, brutal and heavy, and always the color which must be fought and vanquished by the other two."
  Franz Marc (1880-1916), German painter of Der Blaue Reiter. In a letter to Auguste Macke.
  
  
• "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.
  
  
• A riddle:
  Q: What colors should you paint the sun and the wind?
  A: The sun rose and the wind blue!
  (Contributed by Reid Delahunt, 10 years old.)

• "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.
  
  
• "Pigments through the Ages" on whites.

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