Studying Colours
Cintinueing to study something new is important for freelance workers. It can be something fun like going to exhibitions, observing life as you walk along the street or watching films, but sometimes it involves actual studying.
At the moment, I'm studying colour coordination at "career-up" lessons at the Tokyo Metropolitan Vocational Skills Development Center. They have many business training classes which are all very reasonable priced, and I think the lesson quality is great. This four-day course is for gaining a colour coordinater qualification. Designers don't actually need the qualification, but I thought there must be some knowledge I can use.
Gainning a basic knowledge of color is far more difficult than I thought. Before studying color coordination, we have to learn about color in history and culture and many color order systems.
I already have a basic knowledge of things such as hue, value and chroma, but these systems were created from different ideas which are expressed using differnt symbols and terminology as well as different basic colours. It is all very interesting but also very confusing.
Studying colours is not about art or sense, but more like science or maths. The lesson goes quickly because we have to finish a whole book in four days.
Although I was struggling a bit to keep up with the class, I found some interesting topics such as why the sky looks blue and the sunset looks red.
The light is scattered when it hits particles in the atmosphere, such as vapor or dust. Blue light which travels as shorter waves is scattered more than other colours, making the sky appear blue.
In the evening, the distance between the sun and us becomes longer, so blue light becomes more scattered and mostly red and orange light reaches us. That is the sunset. We also learned why clouds are white, and other natural phenomena.
I studied colours at all of the schools I went to, but I didn't learn about details. This is a good opportunity for me and I hope I can get some good inspiration and fresh ideas from the study.
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