Color wheel I designed and painted based on a fractal called an Appollonian gasket, seen here. The fractal is named after the Greek mathematician Appollonius of Perga (also the guy who gave the ellipse, parabola, and hyperbola their names!)
It was quite a lot of fun to construct - I did the equilateral triangle, the largest incircle, and the three largest primary and secondary color circles with traditional construction (straightedge and compass - that was quite fun to figure out). Everything else was done freehand mainly because they were getting so small that constructing them became really difficult.
The Appollonian gasket is generated from triplets of circles, where each circle is tangent to the other two, so the three starting circles were the primary colors (red, yellow, blue) which then branched off to secondary colors (green, orange, purple) and finally tertiary colors (yellow+orange=amber, orange+red=vermillion, red+purple=magenta, purple+blue=violet, blue+green=viridian, green+yellow=chartreuse). I really like the idea of a fractal-esque color wheel - I feel like it gives the usual circular repeating concept of color wheels a new meaning because it repeats forever, continuing on without end.
If I were any good at programming I would love to do one on the computer and make all the circles and color mixings super precise, going on to do the quaternary and quinary colors too...what's particularly symbolic is that these colors go on to grays and browns that approach but never reach black, echoing back to their fractal-esque, infinite nature.
No comments:
Post a Comment