An improbably humorous exploration of color theory

(10) Proof in a Proverbial Pudding?

I was now almost ready to explain in terms that were sensible to me how red and green light could produce yellow. All that remained was to take a harder look at the colors the physicists were using as their red, blue, and green.

I didn't need to be reminded that, at least in the world of pigments, the firetruck red that the physics books spoke of as a primary can be created by using exactly equal parts of "true visual red" (magenta) and yellow. That seemed to indicate that, if the same rules could be found to apply to mixing both colored light and colored pigments, then for all practical purposes, the textbook "red" was really orange--a secondary color, not a primary.

Green was also a secondary color—at least in artists' and printers' parlance. And when I took a closer look at the physicists' "blue," I could see that at best, it was a shade of blue-purple.

In other words, the colors that physicists liked to think of as primaries could actually all be secondaries—orange, purple, and green. What's more, this status as secondaries rather than primaries could very neatly explain how they produced what were known in the world of colored pigments as primaries when they combined.

The most crucial case for me was that of firetruck "red" (half true red and half yellow) when mixed with green. I found that my color arithmetic accounted very acceptably for what happened when these hues were mixed additively, as colored light.

The combination could be represented as follows:

            Orange + Green
            (R+Y)       + (B+Y)

The rules of algebra allowed me to move the parentheses in this expression, giving

            (R+Y+B) + Y

And on closer inspection, this was just another way of saying "light yellow.”

Why light yellow? Because of the creation of a "unit of white."

Also, because this is the color that is actually obtained. It is not on the same light-to-dark "value" level as the orange and green from which it is derived. If it were, most people would not recognize it as yellow. They would think of it perhaps as "tan"--or as "gold" or "ochre." Instead, it has made a "register jump" (Jumped an "octave," in the musical analogy) with the addition of a unit of white.)

© COPYRIGHT 1993 ROBERT WINTER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.