Page:Elementary Color (IA gri c00033125012656167).djvu/56

 merits in the best proportions is equal to O. 46, W. 2, N. 52. The violet is equal to V. 20, W. 1, 1, N. 79, and the nearest approach to a standard green is shown by disk analysis to be G. 37, W. 7, N. 56, which is better than the violet and nearly as good as the orange.

These experiments show that heretofore when a line of standards of six colors has been prepared from three primaries, red, yellow and blue, even though the purest possible colors may have been selected for the primaries, the secondaries have not been in the same class of colors, and that all of them are very dark broken colors. Therefore, in using educational colored papers based on such a scheme, the pupil has received no correct impressions. of the relative values of the several colors involved in pure spectrum scales, but has been shown at the outset a mixture of pure and broken colors as standards.

This is not a matter of opinion regarding best harmonies, because it is easy to demonstrate that less skill is required to combine broken colors harmoniously than pure colors, but it is a choice between truth and error in the early education of color perception.

While it may be impossible for the reader to secure pigments exactly like the standards, red, yellow and blue, used in the above experiments, and therefore the statement here made can not be accurately verified, any one having a color wheel or even a color top may test the same combinations by use of disks. If it is true, as claimed, that a good standard orange can be made by mixing red and yellow, then it should follow that when a red and yellow disk are combined and a smaller orange disk placed in front of them, that it ought to be possible to so adjust the proportion of red to yellow that by rotation the outer ring of color will match the central orange disk.

A trial of this experiment will show that while the color resulting from the best possible combination of red and yellow is a kind of orange, it is not even an approximation to the stand-