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• Colour Literacy Forum #11 Colour Misconceptions and Their Impact in the Classroom

  • When
    01 Mar 2025
  •  
    11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
  • Location
    Virtual

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  The Colour Literacy Forum is an international, collaborative effort to align university-level colour education with current design needs in the culture. The goal of the Forum is to connect faculty, students, and administrators with interdisciplinary professionals to provide cutting-edge research, curricula, tools, and resources.

  The Colour Literacy Forum is a virtual platform featuring presentations and interactive conversations focused on updating and expanding 21st century colour education at the university level. The goal of this global collaboration is to develop an interdisciplinary STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Math) model that positions colour as a Meta-discipline and aligns colour education with current needs in the culture, providing cutting-edge resources, and offering dynamic networking opportunities for all stakeholders.

  Register using the button at left. For complete details visit Colour Literacy Project.

  2025 Series: Facts and Myths About Color

  Colour Misconceptions and Their Impact in the Classroom

  Saturday March 1, 2025, 11am ET
  

  Talk 1: Colour Misconceptions...

  An overview of Forum Series 2025 and a historical perspective on enduring colour misconceptions that have shaped teaching practices for centuries. Robert will present a rationale for adopting a 21st-century approach to Colour Literacy education—one that combines scientific principles with experiential learning. From among the many misconceptions encountered in books, articles and on the Internet, he will briefly discuss four:

  1. All colours can be mixed using a ‘primary’ set of three.

  2. A single simple hue circle or ‘colour wheel’ is all that is needed to illustrate all colour relationships.

  3. There are simple rules that guarantee colour harmony.

  4. Colours have universal symbolic meanings. Using colour categories or simple hue names are sufficient to attach meaning and effect to colours (red is arousing, blue is calming).

  Traditional Colour Theory, or rather its various manifestations, owe their popularity to being vague, simple and easy to explain; however, this simplification makes the theory inaccurate, very often laden with misconceptions which are widely taught and publicized. Decades of intensive work on the use of colour in art lessons by Andreas Schwarz (speaker of the second part of this Forum) reveal serious deficiencies that urgently require fundamental rethinking in this field —deeply and firmly rooted in the tradition of the subject and virtually dominated by ‘traditional colour theory’. In the 21st century, colour education can break the shackles of traditional colour theory and respect colour as a personal, cultural and scientific phenomenon to be experienced, enjoyed and applied as a dynamic tool across multiple disciplines and industries.

  The Speaker: Robert Hirschler

  Robert Hirschler graduated at the Technical University of Budapest in chemical engineering/textile chemistry. In 1967 he presented his first paper on computerized colour matching and has been involved in colorimetry and colour science ever since. He has been involved in AIC activities for over 50 years since his participation at the second AIC Congress (York, 1973). He is an active member of both ProCor (Brazil) and the Hungarian National Colour Committee and a past member of the AIC Executive Committee. On 2010 - 2024 he was Co-Chair of the Study Group on Colour Education and in 2019-2024 Co-Chair of the ISCC/ AIC Colour Literacy Project. His current research interests include the teaching of the basics of colour science to architects, artists and designers as explained in his CR&A article “How much colour science is not too much”, and the colour theory of neo-impressionist painters.

  Talk 2: ...and their impact in the classroom

  Andreas will offer profound and exemplary insights into the teaching of art through the lens of traditional colour theory. His approach is interwoven with the misconceptions about colour analyzed and pointed out by Robert Hirschler. Two key examples—one focusing on subtractive colour mixing and the other on additive colour mixing—will serve as illustrative case studies. These examples were carefully documented as part of a comprehensive five- year qualitative-empirical research project. The study was conducted using participant observation, allowing for an in-depth understanding of the learning process, and was later subjected to a rigorous phenomenological analysis to extract meaningful interpretations. While Robert Hirschler emphasizes the factual inconsistencies and scientific inaccuracies embedded in traditional colour theory, Andreas’ focus will extend beyond theoretical critique. It delves into the dynamic interactions between students and teachers that arise when these outdated theories are put into practice within the classroom setting. The resulting implications are striking, revealing the significant educational challenges and misunderstandings that emerge due to the continued reliance on flawed concepts. These findings underscore the urgent need for action, a mission that the Colour Literacy Project is deeply committed to addressing through its advocacy and educational initiatives.

  The Speaker: Andreas Schwarz

  Since 1998, Andreas Schwarz has been a teacher of Art and English at the municipal girls’ high school in Essen Borbeck. From 2015 to 2021, he served as a private lecturer for art education at the University of Duisburg-Essen. He is a member of the Association for Art Education NRW (BDK) and the Color Literacy Project. His research focuses on the didactics and methodology of colour in art classes, the history of colour in art education, the cultural history of colours, the history and theory of colour systems, and the history of doctrines of colour harmony. He is author of several colour articles and books, such as ‘Farbkompetenz, Orientierungshilfen für eine Didaktik zum Umgang mit Farbe im Kunstunterricht’, published in 2022 (in English, Colour competence - Orientation aids for didactics for dealing with colour in art teaching). For more information visit Andreas’ website:

  https://dr-andreas-schwarz.de/en/index_en.html

  
  

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• March Colorful Connections

  • When
    06 Mar 2025
  •  
    4:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    virtual
  • Spaces left
    37
  • Registered
    3 registrants

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  Colorful Connections is an opportunity to gather informally with other members of ISCC for a little socializing, networking and learning from each other. Discussions are wide-ranging and depend on attendees, their current interests and past experience. Consider this the online version of coffee breaks and happy hours at a color conference. BYO coffee or beverage and join in the conversation! 

  Note that this is Members Only event. Not a member, no problem - Join here!

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• ISCC Webinar - John Wiens presents How life became colorful: the evolution of conspicuous colors (and their functions) in plants and animals

  • When
    15 Apr 2025
  •  
    2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
  • Location
    virtual

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  How life became colorful: the evolution of conspicuous colors (and their
  functions) in plants and animals

  In this talk, I will discuss recent work by my collaborators and myself on the evolution of colors in animals and plants. Plants and animals are often adorned with potentially conspicuous colours (e.g. red, yellow, orange, blue, purple). These include the dazzling colours of fruits and flowers, the brilliant warning colours of frogs, snakes, and invertebrates, and the spectacular sexually selected colours of insects, fish, birds, and lizards. Such signals are often thought to evolve by utilizing pre-existing sensitivities in the receiver’s visual systems (e.g. sexually selected coloration evolved to utilize sensitivities to brightly colored fruit). This raises the question: what was the initial function of conspicuous colouration and colour vision? Here, we review the origins of colour vision, fruit, flowers, and aposematic and sexually selected colouration, and when each one evolved. We find that aposematic colouration is widely distributed across animals but relatively young, evolving only in the last ~150 million years (Myr). Sexually selected colouration in animals appears to be confined to arthropods and chordates, and is also relatively young (generally <100 Myr). Colourful flowers likely evolved ~200 million years ago (Mya), whereas colourful fruits/seeds likely evolved ~300 Mya. Colour vision (sensu lato) appears to be substantially older, and likely originated ~400–500 Mya in both arthropods and chordates. Thus, colour vision may have evolved long before extant lineages with fruit, flowers, aposematism, and sexual colour signals.  We also find that there appears to have been an explosion of colour within the last ~100 Myr, including >200 origins of aposematic colouration across nine animal phyla and >200 origins of sexually selected colouration among arthropods and chordates.

  Bio:

  John J. Wiens is a Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona.  Prior to coming to Arizona in 2013, he was an Associate Professor and Assistant Professor at Stony Brook University in New York (2003–2012).  Before that he was a curator of herpetology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh (1995–2002).  He obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin (1995), and his B.S. degree at the University of Kansas (1991).  He has served as an Associate Editor for several journals in ecology and evolution (e.g. American Naturalist, Ecography, Ecology Letters, Evolution, Systematic Biology) and as Editor-in-Chief of the Quarterly Review of Biology.  He is an ISI Highly Cited Researcher and a winner of the President’s Award of the American Society of Naturalists.  He has published >250 scientific papers.  He studies many questions in ecology and evolutionary biology, and especially the origins of biodiversity patterns and the impacts of climate change.  He is also interested in phylogeny, speciation, sexual selection, niche evolution, and the biology of reptiles and amphibians.  He has been interested in the evolution of conspicuous colors in animals for many years.

  
  

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