Colouring your world

Visual harmony

Welcome to the third day of our special Sensory Home week at The Coach House. Each day from Monday to Friday, I’ll be sharing a post on one of the five senses – there will be thoughts and ideas for everyone, plus an exercise for paid subscribers that will be a way of exploring that specific sense. Click below to get unlimited access to all of the coaching exercises for this week and in previous paid posts.

There’s an ongoing argument in our house about the colour blue, or is it green? That’s the disagreement. I will swear one way, my family the other. Of course, the name doesn’t matter in the end. We all like the hue, whatever we call it.

Scientists estimate we can see around one million different colours. Can you imagine a paint chart that huge? Or the scale of the rainbow needed to encompass them all? The complex process of sight, and of colour recognition within that, begins when light waves reach the retina at the back of the eye, where there are millions of light-receptive cells. Cone cells, of which there are three types, mainly detect colour; rod cells are sensitive to black and white. Together, the cells send nerve signals to the brain which then interprets and names the colours it sees. There’s your brown coffee mug. Here are the cracked tallow hues of a bar of soap. 

My cones and rods won’t be exactly the same as yours, so the colour I see will be different to the bottle green you swear is in front of you. The differences in vision and interpretation will be greater for anyone with a recognised colour impairment (around eight per cent of men and one per cent of women).

We had a friend named Steve who couldn’t see red and green, just shades of grey where those hues would usually show up. I have a photo of us outside ‘the red pub’ on London’s Theobald’s Road. Looking back now, we must have called it by its name, not its casual colour moniker, when arranging to meet there.

There are tints, tones and shades of colours, and it’s these I think of when considering how we might understand the rainbow of our inner world; shifting the palette of our moods by adding a dash of light or a smudge of dark; emotions rather than pigments.

Hue is the pure colour.

Tint is white added to a hue, creating a lighter interpretation.

Shade is created by adding black to a hue, so you’ll get a darker version.

Tone is the addition of grey to a hue.

If you imagine waking and looking at the blank canvas of your day ahead, what hue would you paint on it to create the background mood? Will you add white, black or grey to temper the emotion, or perhaps add another colour to create a deeper sense of the feeling?

Coming back to the easel in the hours that follow, what colours will you add? A daub of acid yellow after a challenging phone call, or a cerise swoosh to denote the joy of spotting cherry trees in the park?

What complementary colours would you begin to paint in – the contrasting hues that sit on opposite sides of the colour wheel, and which when paired together, seem to shine brighter and stronger?

Perhaps your colours are people. I imagine a freckle hue for my youngest child; a bleached cornfield for my eldest; navy for my husband.

I think I am green (and now I’m wondering if my family don’t recognise me, and think I’m blue instead).

So today, let’s create a colour chart…

Home work: Colour by numbers

This exercise is inspired by The Chromologist podcast – a kind of Desert Island Discs of paint colours, with Patrick O’Donnell from Farrow & Ball interviewing people about the hues that represent different decades of her their lives. Guests have included musician Cerys Matthews, chef Skye Gyngell and fashion stylist Tan France.

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