My Portal Project

…that most techies know the primary colors are Red, Green, and Blue, but artists know the primary colors are Red, Yellow, and Blue? The reason why comes down to the differences of chemistry versus physiology.

The human eye has three types of receptor cones, each one being sensitive to a different band of light. The bands of light they are sensitive to are Red, Green, and Blue-violet. In order for a human to see yellow you need to send equal amounts of red and green light to stimulate the red and green receptors. This is why computer monitors use the RGB color scheme and why projection tv’s have three lenses of red, green, and blue.

With something like paints and inks, the effect is subtractive. Inks and paints absorb certain light and prevent it from reflecting back to the human eye. To the right is the typical primary color wheel seen in every art class, which also tells us which colors absorb other colors. Yellow absorbs blue light, blue absorbs red, and red absorbs yellow. So if yellow ink absorbs blue light, it would only allow Red and Green light to reach your eye, which we know is how the brain sees yellow.

The chemistry portion comes into play when you mix paint and ink pigments, and this is why artists see Red, Yellow, and Blue, as the primary colors. Every other color can be made using different combinations of these three colors.

So for the human eye to see green, you would need to use colors that absorb red light and blue light. We know that yellow absorbs blue, and blue absorbs red, which is why blue + yellow = green.

I really have now idea why I found this so fascinating.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 27th, 2005 at 4:55 pm and is filed under Did you know. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.