Everywhere colour

Human eyes have approximately 12 million rods and 7 million cones in them – that’s a lot of things in a small place! These help us to see everything around us, including sending colour information to our brain so that it can help us to see colour.

Colour can be bright or dull, warm or cold, natural or made artificially. It can be blue, red, yellow, purple, orange, green and much more! Sometimes you may hear people call something a ‘hue’. Hue is just another name for pure colour that does not have white or black in it.

Everyone has their favourites colours and the colours they don’t like! What are your favourite colours? What are the favourite colours of your friends and family? Are they the same?

Often you can tell what someone’s favourite colours are by the clothes they wear. Think about the clothes you have – how many of them are in your favourite colour?

Tiny particles of colour called pigments are what gives plants, animals, humans and minerals their colouring. They are also used to colour paints and dyes made by humans. Pigments absorb colours but reflect their own colour. What this means is that a green pigment will absorb all colours except green, which it will reflect. When you mix paints or pigments different colours are absorbed and reflected and this is how we can create lots of different colours.

The Everywhere colour series will cover lots of things about colour and has projects you can try out for yourself to find out how things work. Colour is magical and lots of fun to experiment with... enjoy!

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