Colorizing

When I was in school, I was taught how to make colors with paint, and my understanding of color has been pigment-based since then, so imagine my confusion to find that when mixing light instead of paint, there are different primary colors!  For instance, in pigments, Blue+Yellow=Green; Blue and Yellow are primary and Green is secondary.  In additive color mixing, Red+Green=Yellow, and in subtractive color mixing, Yellow+Cyan=Green! 

By MichaelMaggs, from Wikimedia Commons

RAINBOW ORDER

Rainbow rising in Jasper National Park, Alberta, Canada. By Wing-Chi Poon, via Wikimedia Commons

The spectrum of visible light is also known as the rainbow order.  This is abbreviated ROYGBIV: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet.  Violet encompasses hues from purple to red-purple, so the rainbow can bend back on itself from there to red. 

What if I'm colorizing things, like my stash of fabrics?  What about white, black, brown, pink and such?  If I'm doing rainbow order, I put white at the front (before red) and black at the end, since they're not actually found in the rainbow.)  Brown I think of as a shade of dark orange, and pink as pale red; colors like that go in between the other colors according to their dominant hue. 

If you think of colors as warm or cool (more red or more blue in make-up), the rainbow order is pretty evenly divided:

WARM
Red, Orange, Yellow

MIXED
Green

COOL
Blue, Indigo, Violet. 

MY SATURATION ORDER

Though I know the rainbow order, in my own home I tend to colorize things differently, according to what I've decided to call a saturation order.  (I should clarify that I didn't set out to do non-rainbow order... I just put things how I liked them, and one day I decided to analyze my choices!)  Looking at three places--my thread storage, my closet, and my earring rack--I find the same order:

White, yellow, pink, (orange), red, brown, green, gray, (blue), (black)

The colors in parentheses are colors I don't have much of.  For instance, I don't own a single orange shirt, but I have some orange jewelry and two spools of orange thread.  I don't wear blue at all (except blue jeans, and they don't count because they're so ubiquitous in America that they are more of a neutral than a color choice!), but I have blue and aqua threads for alterations.  I don't wear black, but I have a ton of black thread because it's versatile for sewing any dark fabric. 

Like the rainbow model, my color order divides warm from cool colors:

WARM
Yellow, Pink, Orange, Red, Brown

MIX
Green

COOL
Gray, (Blue), (Black)

Not evenly divided; I clearly prefer warm colors! 

Unlike the rainbow order, this model doesn't include all colors.  I don't have a spot for violet, for instance.  And my pinks are various shades of rose, not hot-pink. 

So what is saturation?  Think of what your room looks like in the moonlight, when the "Cold-hearted orb that rules the night / Removes the colours from our sight / Red is grey is yellow white".  When everything turns some shade of gray, what you have instead of color is saturation, or how filled a thing is.  As Graeme Edge points out, yellow looks like white (lower saturation) and red looks like gray (darker than white, so a higher saturation).  Blue and purple might look like black (very high saturation).  Saturation was the reason that Hitchcock had to use chocolate syrup to represent blood in the shower scene of Psycho: the red theatrical "blood", once mixed with water in the drain, became pink, and pink was not highly saturated enough to show up on black and white film!  Chocolate syrup, being darkly saturated, showed up even after mixing with water. 

So it seems that the organizing principle behind my instinctive color organization is saturation:

NO SATURATION   --->   LOW SATURATION   --->   MEDIUM SATURATION   --->   HIGH SATURATION

White  --->    Yellow, Pink    --->     Orange, Red, Brown, Green, Gray     --->  Blue, Black

When I do the rainbow order, I have to think about ROYGBIV, but when I do saturation order, I naturally put things the same place every time. 

How do you organize color?  What colors do you have around you all the time?