Color Physics. Or how to use color in a formal way for world-building.
Color psychology and color symbolism respectively, describe how different colors may evoke a physical or psychological effect on viewers, or the typical conceptual/symbolical associations that color has had throughout history, culture, art…
These two concepts have been extensively used in art and marketing, to either explain why we use certain colors in certain contexts, or to communicate a symbolic message via the intentional use of color. However, they’re not much of a science.
It’s hard to discern to what extent color may or may not have a physical or psychological effect on humans, so I won’t discuss color psychology here. I want to focus on color symbology, the intentional use of color to communicate symbolic meaning.
And instead of trying to find a singular universal way to describe color symbolism, to offer a template to build many models for color symbology, models that unlike typical color symbolism, are formally described in a specific and self-consistent way.
These models of “color physics” can be constructed by artists and world-builders, who want to assign specific symbolic, conceptual — perhaps even functional — uses for color in their art or virtual worlds.
This is already done in many occasions in an informal way, but by describing a formal framework to do so, we can avoid contradictions, discover unrealized connections between colors, or simply better communicate what we’re trying to do.
By creating connections between colors, and writing these down in the form of “laws”, we can create much richer physics of color. Not only ascribing independent conceptual or symbolical meanings to singular colors, but also to their different possible associations or connections.
There’s one recent videogame that I know of that did exactly this. And it did it masterfully, in a way I haven’t seen done in any other game. On top of this, the model of color or “physics of color” they used, matches almost perfectly with the historical or traditional definitions of color symbology for the different colors used.
Which means the player can more intuitively grasp how color is being used, if not consciously, perhaps subconsciously, even when this intentional usage of color is not being described to them. The game I’m referring to, is the infamous Elden Ring.
This wonderful video by Hawkshaw breaks down how color was used in Elden Ring, I highly recommend you take a look at it after you’ve finished reading this article:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xcIEWVFSce8
For the purpose of this article, I’m going to describe a model or physics of color, using the 6 primary and secondary RGB hues (red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, and yellow). The model I’ll describe here is pretty similar and compatible for ecample with the one apparently used in Elden Ring.
How many colors?
The first thing we need to ask ourselves is, how many colors do we want our color model to have (each one presumably with their own symbolism and meaning)?
Defining what color is can be tricky, there are millions of possible colors in the RGB space, we clearly can’t define all of them, in fact, we need to be very selective choosing for our color model a few dozen or less colors to make it manageable. How do we make are selection then?
We’re going to define color here with the HSV/HSB system (hue, saturation, value/brightness), where every color is define by a hue (which is an angle on the color wheel, from 0°–360°), and a value from 0–100 for saturation and brightness.
It can be argued that hue is the real differentiator between colors, since two colors of different hue are clearly different, while colors of the same hue but slightly brighter or less saturated often look like a muted version of the same hue, and if pushed to the extremes, all colors look black or white near 0 and 100 brightness, and grey near to 0 saturation.
So we can strip the huge 3D color space by getting rid of the brightness and saturation dimensions, and keep the 1D “hue ring” from 0°–360°. Even so, we should break this down even further, colors with small differences in hue are too similar and are likely to get confused. So we should divide our color wheel in a finite number of slices of equal angle.
To have more than enough granularity I went and divided the color wheel into 24 points, with 15° of separation in hue from each point. I named the 24 hues using the exact or closest match in hue value, taken from Wikipedia’s WikiProject Color. For reasons I’ll discuss next, I’ve highlighted 9 of those 24 hues in the following image:
In practical viewing conditions, discerning easily between two adjacent hues of the 24 here shown is unlikely. For simplicity’s sake we should select as few hues as possible, that are clearly distinguishable, but without leaving out any major known color if we want to maximize all the possibilities. This range probably lies somewhere between 6–12 hues.
The 6 primary and secondary colors are fundamental, but beyond that, colors like violet and orange are also very common so I added those to the mix. I added the ninth hue, Spring Green, to encompass 3 of the 6 tertiary hues, to end up with one personal model of color I like, with 9 hues. Although in this article I’ll only talk about the 6 primary and secondary hues.
Building connections
Now that we have our 9 hues (6 for this article), our “points”, it’s time to start connecting the dots, to see how we can connect these different hues together. From these connections and using our prior knowledge and imagination, we’ll start putting together their symbolic meaning.
Instead of defining at the start the meaning of our 6 hues, we should leave that as the final step. We should work out a temporary symbology through the connections we want to make, and derive the final symbology for each hue from these connections. The connections or structure between hues we discover or impose, will clue us in on what each individual hue should represent.
We will represent the connections between hues with arrows (→) to represent “flows” (these are like dials, a continuous increase or decrease of a single parameter or quantity), or lines (—) to signify a simple connection (these are more akin to switches or sides of a coin or dice, a set of distinct yet intra-connected concepts, such as duals, opposites, family members…), in the form of 1D diagrams (a fancy way to say that we can write them in a line of text, using a letter or letters to represent the hue, and arrows or lines to represent the connections between them).
Creating a new universe from color
Let’s try to build a color model for an imaginary virtual world, with things like magic, but otherwise very similar to ours. We’ll start at the beginning, the beginning of the universe. Let’s focus on the concept of entropy. In our universe, we started at a very low state of entropy, and it’s been increasing steadily over time since, as the second law of thermodynamics dictates. The inevitable expected end for our universe, being one with the highest possible entropy, also referred as the “heat death” of the universe.
We start with low entropy at extremely high temperatures, and we’ll end with high entropy and really cold temperatures. Life and all the interesting complex stuff happens as a blip, in the middle. With this information we can start to define part of the symbolism of our first 3 colors, the primary colors red, green, and blue. A connection between these 3 could be:
R→G → B: Red represents systems with very low entropy (↓↓S), blue represents systems with very high entropy (↑↑S), green represents a transitional state or a non-spontaneous state, one that fights against the second law of thermodynamics by using energy to maintain entropy (∆S=0), in other words—homeostasis. And we can see there’s a flow from red to blue, from low to high entropy, with green in between.
Life is the perpetual fight against entropy by using energy. So green can represent life. This energy comes mostly from the sun, the sun is a giant burning ball of plasma, living in the emptiness of cold space. We can add new concepts, such as red being associated with exothermic processes (a source of energy), and blue being associated with endothermic processes (dissipating or absorbing energy, a sink of energy).
Red and blue happen spontaneously, green is not spontaneous and requires energy, fuel, which is provided by the source of energy (red). Stars (red) give rise to life (green), and when life ends, we die, and turn blue. Let’s now create another connection, not a flow of something, but a simple way to connect conceptually these 3 hues.
R—G — B: taking a cue from Elden Ring, we’ll make red represent the body, the material. Blue represent the mind, the immaterial. And green represent the health of the body.
Let’s also define the secondary hues, in relation to the other 3 primary hues, in the form of flows. Let’s pair each primary hue with their opposite secondary color in the color wheel:
R→C: Red to cyan. Since red we’ve already associated it with heat/energy, we’ll make this the flow of thermal energy, vibration. It starts extremely hot, at red, and gets cooler and cooler, to the extreme cyan. In this way red now represents fire, cyan represents ice. These could even be magical concepts, such as fire magic and ice magic.
Y→B: Yellow to blue. Since we said blue represents the mind, let’s say that the mind, blue, acts like a vessel for knowledge, a knowledge that comes from the platonic realm of ideas, represented by yellow. So knowledge flows from yellow to blue.
G→M: Green to magenta. In Elden Ring Magenta is associated with sleep, green with awakeness or alertness, so this is a natural flow we can borrow.
R→M→B: Let’s use this flow to represent emotions. Red is now the source of intense emotions, blue the absence of emotions, the coldness of logic, and magenta in the middle, analogous to green, can represent a balance, a sort of homeostasis but of emotions instead of the body. Here magenta represents mental health, in contrast to green which represents body health.
Other flows we can describe can help us further define yellow and blue. Yellow is often associated with warmth (mild form of heat), and blue with cold. We’ve already established that red and cyan represent these extremes, so let’s use yellow and blue to represent a milder version of these two, getting more extreme the closer they get to their respective paired hue. So:
Y→R: Yellow to red, from warmth to extreme heat.
B→C: Blue to cyan, from mild cold to extreme cold.
Let’s introduce now a non-directional connection or duality between these primary and secondary pairs:
Y—B: We’ve described yellow as warmth and blue as cold. Another typical association with warmth is sunlight, and cold with night, so we can say that yellow represents the day, and blue its counterpart, the night. blue can also represent the cosmos, yellow the life on Earth, under the sunlight.
R—C: In Elden Ring red represents our uncivilized primal nature. In Dark Souls 3 the enemy boss “Dancer of the Boreal Valley” is represented with ice magic (cyan), and is an example of civility and gracefulness. So we can make red represent our animal untamed nature, and cyan represent our tamed, more civilized nature.
G—M: As mentioned previously, magenta represents sleep, in the souls series and in cosmic horror dreams are often considered realms themselves one can travel to. So we can use this duality, magenta to represent the dreaming world, and green to represent the waking world.
These are just a few connections we’ve decided to make for these six hues, we can make these as complicated and numerous as we want. We can even put them all together in a sort of graph like the one below, where hues are points, arrows and lines describe the connections and flows between them. This is our formal way to construct meaning for colors and their connections, the entirety or most of the symbolic meaning of each individual color comes from their relationship to others, and the relations themselves also have meaning. It is similar in this regard to a discipline in math called Category Theory (where , although implemented in a more loose and less rigorous way:
We can also use the 1D descriptions of these connections as a legend, to help interpret the above image, and keep track of all the connections we’ve made:
Final remarks
And this is how one can start constructing a model or physics of color, by defying colors as points, drawing connections between these different points, and assigning to both points and connections symbolic meaning. This can be used to create systems of magic, color-related lore, or any number of possibilities. We don’t need any prior knowledge of color symbolism, although it always help to know what are the traditional descriptions we tend to assign to color.
One of the issues of color symbolism is that when you google what is the symbology associated to a specific color, the results are all over the place. Many times different colors are said to represent the same concept, people introduce their own preferences and bias, people get too whimsy and creative and let go of reason or logic. Two descriptions for the same color may imply contradictory concepts, in essence, there doesn’t seem to be much glue, cohesively gluing all these descriptions together.
There is no true system or model of color symbology, all we have is a bunch of scattered data points of typical, historical, or cultural meanings we associate to color. However as we’ve seen, this does not mean that we cannot construct are own models, which are much better defined and consistent, an can be represented even with a simple picture of dots and arrows. This is extremely useful for artistic purposes.
It may be all artificial, these models don’t represent an underlying truth of the universe, they are as artificial as the constellations we draw from our egocentric earth-centered point of view, of our surrounding universe. But although they lack inherent meaning, we can give them any meaning we want, and this is extremely satisfying and useful.
If you haven’t check the prior video I linked above, it’s well worth your time, it goes into heavy detail on a practical example of how color was used to build the world and lore of a videogame:
