Colour Forum: On Light, Colour and the FCM

Abstract

Why propose a new colour model? And why the FCM?
Over the years many architects, artists and researchers in Sweden and Norway have used the colour atlas of the Natural Colour System (NCS).
I found it however unsatisfactory, and began to suspect that the problem was not the colour nuances that the atlas contained but those that were not there. Returning to the theory from which the NCS atlas had been developed, I found that black and white were represented at a distance one third shorter, as measured from the centre, than were the four unique colours in the theorys colour circle. This anomaly meant that the four colours red, yellow, green and blue would be overrepresented. Moreover,
I found no good reason why black and white should not be seen as an antagonistic pair, equivalent to either of the two colour pairs in the NCS colour circle. After all, each of the six colours in the three pairs has the unique quality of lacking all similarity with the other five. Further, in my view there was a seventh colour with a similar, unique quality, which was not presented as an independent entity in NCS theory, namely grey.
Grey differs from the other six colours in one respect only and that is
in having no antagonist colour. These seven unique colours became
the starting point for the development of a new colour model,
which for consistency and simplicity has been expressed in terms
of a sphere. I have called it the Fog Colour Model (FCM ).