Why Your Art Teacher Lied About Primary Colors
In elementary school, my art teacher said the primary colors were red, blue, and yellow. I believed my art teacher. I looked up to my art teacher. And what does she do in return? She betrays me!
Just as parents explain one day that Santa Clause isn’t real, Wikipedia explained to me that red, blue and yellow are not the primary colors:
In particular natural cyan and magenta pigments were hard to come by, and therefore blue and red hues were used respectively. Thus to this day it is widely taught that red, yellow and blue are the primary colors and that orange, green and purple the secondary colors. In reality it is impossible to obtain a saturated green by mixing blue and yellow or a saturated purple by mixing blue and red. This practical problem is often solved by calling pink “red” and light blue “blue”.
Calling pink “red”? What has the world come to? Don’t art teachers think we can handle the truth?
If you’re reading this, Mrs. Whatever-Your-Name-Is, I expect a letter of apology.
November 26th, 2006
Maureen Stone, who presents on color theory at the visualization conference I attend each year, has a good book on digital color theory.
If you’re looking for more untruths try the explanation commonly given for why airplanes fly, or information on lactic acid.
November 26th, 2006
By the way, the thingie that records the number of comments is not working correctly. Please see http://www.jimcarson.com/nerd.jpg
November 27th, 2006
Thanks, Jim! Those links look interesting.
And the comment thing was just a glitch, I guess. It said I needed to approve one of your comments, and once I did everything worked like it should.
December 11th, 2006
Your elementary school art teacher is correct. The primary colors are red, blue, and yellow. They combine to make secondary colors which are green, orange, and purple. If you want to be a PAINTER, one who mixes REAL paints not on a computer screen, you will not get white by mixing red, blue, and yellow. You will get something close to black. That’s it.
December 14th, 2006
Thanks for commenting, Brenda! I still have to disagree with you, though. While it’s true that red, blue and yellow are still often considered the primary colors in the painting world, they can’t actually produce every color. That’s why printers use cyan, magenta and yellow, not red, blue, and yellow. From what I understand, painters don’t actually create every color by mixing red, blue and yellow. They mix many different colors together to get what they need.
I suggest you read Wikipedia’s page on the RYB Color Model, as well as this page: The primary colors are not red, blue, and yellow. On a computer screen, the primary colors are red, blue, and green. They all mix to produce white. For mixing real paints/pigments, the true primary colors are cyan, magenta and yellow. They all mix to produce black, or something very close to black.
July 30th, 2008
You try telling people this and they try to have you locked up
November 23rd, 2008
The difference is pigment based colours and optical colours.
For printing and TV purposes they use Cyan - Magenta - Yellow, for painting they use Red - Yellow and Blue.
If you mix the optical colours as pigments you will soon find you have hassles. The reason they work in printing is they are transparent and one on top of the other creates an optical mix for our eyes.
November 26th, 2008
Wikipedia isn’t a credited and valid site for information with all colleges. Sense anyone can put information on that site.
March 30th, 2010
I used to be a college film instructor. Now, I’m a professional cinematographer. I tried to teach that Le Blon did the best he could in the 18th Century, that it was proven wrong and that yellow has never been a primary color.
I was nearly fired for insisting upon this. I was instructed by the head of the department to tell students “There is room for more than one belief in this area.” BULLSHIT. This isn’t about belief! This is about SCIENCE.
People like Brenda love falling back on the “paint versus light” argument. But, Brenda, you do realize that when a printer prints with pigments THAT IT IS PAINT! The professional inks used in an offset printer are essentially paint.
The only issues is understanding the difference between subtractive and additive colors. However, that doesn’t result in two sets of primary colors. RGB is still primary. CMYK, for printers, allows printers to reproduce a greater range of colors than RGB. But, the human eye has only three color cones (red, green and blue) and two color rods (black and white). There’s no such thing as a cyan color cone in the human eye.
Primary colors are based on science. The science comes from how the human eye absorbs light, converts it into electrical impulses and the brain synthesizes a full color spectrum from finding the closest color to white, using it as a baseline and recreating all other colors from that base.
When we use pigments on paper, play with pigments on a computer screen or apply colored gels to lights we need to remember those are merely TOOLS. The science is always the same, regardless of the tool we use. Sometimes, using RGB is a better tool (as in applying colored gels to a motion picture light) and sometimes using CMYK is a better tool (as in using different pigments on a Hiedelberg press). Sometimes CMYK isn’t enough to get certain colors to pop, so printers will use a 5 color or 6 color process. That doesn’t mean the extra colors are suddenly primary! They’re just TOOLS in creating a greater range of color options.
RGB. That’s it…at least for our species.
March 30th, 2010
Oh, and Steve…you’re wrong. You’re really wrong.
Motion pictures, television, theater and video games use an RGB model. Why? Because they use light-emitting instruments to “paint” and therefore colored gels based on an RGB model recreate a larger color pallette.
Traditional offset printers use a CMYK model (sometimes with a fifth and sixth color to make sure a desired hue really pops) for the same reason…when applying pigment to paper, it recreates a larger color space.
Digital printers go both ways. I’ve worked with digital printers who can perfectly recreate my work in photoshop within an RGB color space and others insist on a CMYK color space.
Your vocabulary is just nonsense. “Optical colors?” Did you invent that term? All colors are OPTICAL. You mean subtractive and additive color, which is better described as subtractive and additive color spaces.
Even more importantly, what you describe as color is HUE. It’s only one of three components for what laymen refer to as color. To be specific, white value (often referred to as value), saturation (also known as intensity) and hue (what you’re calling color) are present in any specific color.
There are many tools for manipulating color space so that all three of these elements (white value, saturation and hue) are maximized. None of them magically change the science of the human eye. Red cones, blue cones, green cones, white rods and black rods. That’s it, folks. That’s the science of how humans perceive color. The methods we use to maximize our ability to recreate color is an ever-expanding toolkit…but, they don’t change the science. They’re just tools.
July 2nd, 2010
Interesting discussion, I have one question. If a primary colour is one that can’t be made up of other colours (that’s what I understood ‘primary’ to mean in this respect) and according to Justin yellow is not a primary colour, what colours make up yellow?