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I must have missed something as a seven-year-old, because this is the first I've heard that blue and yellow were supposed to be opposites. To me, it always made sense that blue and orange were opposites, both conceptually and visually. The same with purple and yellow.
Artists get it wrong I kinda get upset about all his use of "artist" as a derogatory term. Have he ever painted anything in real life? Beleive it or not, just a canvas plus red, blue and yellow acrylic paint will be enough. Oh, and some kind of talent.
This is actually not completely true, but I appreciate the point you are making.
Something we shouldn't overlook is that there no pigments that fit perfectly on a color wheel. In other words, there's no blue pigment, its always blueish green or blueish purple.
This has been a challenge for pigment makers for centuries and has a complicated history.
Maybe sometimes a perfect pigment or dye is found, color wise, but then it turns out to easily fade, aka 'fugitive', so artists, the ones who expect their art work to last for more than a few years, are stuck with certain colors.
Why does this matter? Its because of mixing. You might think you have paints of the primaries, blue, yellow, and red, and you need a bright green, so you mix the blue with the yellow, and you end up with an muddy olive color.
Turns out your blue was leaning towards being purplish, and when mixed with the yellow, a component of grey was produced, because they are opposite.
So how do you get a nice bright green? You need to mix a greenish blue with a greenish yellow.
In practice this results in artists, who want to paint with a full range of colors, need 6 primary colors.
For example, two good lightfast (not destroyed by light) blues are ultramarine (very old pigment), and a newer phthalo blue (much more modern). The ultramarine leans towards the violet and the phthalo, to varying degrees, towards green. In the old days I think prussian blue was the greenish blue of choice, but its a weak color and is easily overpowered.
Cobalt blue, if I'm not mistaken, is the closest thing we have to a lightfast primary color.
Artist really hit the jackpot with blues. Some are very old. They are also nicely transparent, which can make a difference in technique
The bright reds and bright yellows aren't so good, and the ones that are lightfast are supposed to be toxic. And not very transparent either.
If you don't care about the brightness of your reds and yellows you are in luck, there are plenty of rust and dirt pigments like iron oxide, sienna and umber.
This is a complicated subject. Here's a book about it
http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Yellow-Dont-Make-Green/dp/0967962...
EDIT: joeld42 answered my question elsewhere on this page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2166782 The artists reds and blues are just approximations to the magenta and cyan of printers. ---- So I understand that in order to mimic the electromagnetic stimulation to the cones you only need to control the amount of RGB light hitting the retina. And I understand that propagating light is additive, so that for light…
Artists get it wrong I kinda get upset about all his use of "artist" as a derogatory term. Have he ever painted anything in real life? Beleive it or not, just a canvas plus red, blue and yellow acrylic paint will be enough. Oh, and some kind of talent.
But seriously, I also paint with CMYK only and there are a lot of tricks to get colors you cannot create with these colors alone. Like bright red. When you first paint yellow, let it dry and paint red over it (transparent) you will get some sort of light bending which makes the red brighter. Car painters do this all the time.
But the author is right in a way. By creating contrast you can paint black darker then your paint is. It's all about what's going on in the mind.
It is a beautiful book.
This article tries to sensationalize and obfuscate something that is pretty simple in reality. RGB are the primaries in light. By mixing these three colors you can create any color the human vision system can perceive (yes, because of tristimulus). When white light hits a material, some of those RGB wavelengths are absorbed (subtracted). RGB - GB(Cyan) = Red, RGB - RG(Yellow) = Blue, RGB - RB(Magenta) = Green. Thus,…
It would be like an introduction to the web which begins "professional software developers believe that the internet is the same as the blue 'e' icon on the desktop, but actually..." No, software developers does not believe that, but the layman reader may.
Btw. I disagree that mixing primary inks yield brown because inks are imperfect. Rather, brown is the color you would expect according to theory, because mixing pigments should average their effect.