No mention that both sets of primaries come from the biology of the average human eye, and other animals might be better served by other colors? Ok, yeah, that's not really relevant to the point the article was actually getting to, but I think it's important to remember. There's nothing magical about those colors. They effectively stimulate color receptors in our eyes such that our brains interpret the input in ways that can be combined to cover a pretty large gamut of the full range our eyes can perceive.
But as for what the article actually does focus on, I absolutely agree. You can create some really striking art by restricting your gamut to the range you can cover with a particular set of pigments.
Related is that English has 11 basic color terms: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, orange, pink, purple, and gray. As a result, trying to teach cyan and magenta as primary colors will be much harder than teaching blue and red as primary colors.
Eliminating from your 11-item list the words that cannot designate saturated colors, i.e. black, white, brown, pink and gray, there remain 6 words for saturated colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple.
Besides these 6 words, 2 more words are useful for naming saturated colors. The use of the word "violet" is widespread enough that it should be added to the list as a basic English color term.
The distinction between violet and purple is that while both are mixtures of red and blue, violet contains a small enough amount of red that it can be matched by a monochromatic color in the violet range of the spectrum, while purple contains an amount of red that is great enough so that it can be matched only by a mixture of monochromatic red with monochromatic blue.
A word is needed for the blue-green color. Cyan is a misnomer that should be avoided, but "turquoise" is a word that has been used in English for many centuries for designating the blue-green color (and which is used for the same purpose in many other European languages, all of which have borrowed the word from French, like also English). "Teal" is another synonym for "blue-green", which has been introduced in the 20th century.
There have been many misunderstandings about the words used by Isaac Newton for his circle of colors, but I believe that when his words are interpreted correctly, he was right.
Isaac Newton has divided the saturated colors into 8 colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blew or blue, indico or indigo, violet and purple. The first 7 of these were classified as prismatic colors, i.e. as monochromatic colors.
Isaac Newton spelled blue as both "blew" and "blue", and also indigo was spelled as both "indico" and "indigo". While the meaning of the other color words is not ambiguous, the meaning of these 2 words is not clear.
The words used by Isaac Newton were the names of some paints, whose hue he compared with the colors obtained by the dispersion of the solar light. The "indico" paint was presumably made with the indigo pigment, so it must have been blue.
The "blew" or "blue" of Isaac Newton was the color of the "blue Bise" paint. "Bise" is more frequently spelled "bice" and it was the name of a paint based on copper carbonate. Depending on the exact details of its method of preparation, such a paint will contain a mixture of malachite and azurite pigments, so it might have any hue between green and blue. We do not know who was Newton's paint supplier or any other details about the paint used by Newton, so it cannot be known for sure which was the real color of Newton's "blew".
Nevertheless I assume that Newton's "blue Bise" was actually a blue-green paint, because only in this case Newton's classification of the saturated colors will make perfect sense, because blue-green and blue are distinctive enough to deserve to have their own names.
So translated into modern English, the 8 saturated colors of Isaac Newton would be: red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, blue, violet and purple. This classification remains right.
One of the things I love about “Contact” is that the contact mechanism chosen by the aliens was so close to what I guessed aliens would use when I first learned about SETI.
Decimal is not universal. Not seconds, not meters, not sound frequencies used for communication, not colors. Our sky isn’t blue, it’s purple. Ask any bee and they’ll tell you. But hydrogen glows at very specific colors and that only changes if you are moving fast enough.
The fundamental colors are the colors of the elements and, I might argue, their oxides. As reflected by light or when they incandesce. Gold. Rust. Arsenic green. Carbon black. Maybe the emission bands of noble gases, though those are hardly every day items.
(If I were a very clever alien though, and I discovered exotic states of matter where the elements behaved differently, and I only wanted to talk to other very clever aliens, I might use those instead to talk over the heads of the younger or dumber species, which is why I stopped contributing to SETI. We are looking under the wrong rocks, IMO).
It is easier to understand additive primaries through a chromaticity diagram. You can form colors by mixing the primaries, and the gamut is determined by the hull of the primaries. Obviously you need at least three of them to enclose a space.
There’s more to colour perception than the cone cells in the retina. There’s also the opponent process in the visual cortex, which is where preschool primary colours come from. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opponent_process
As somebody living in central europe I have never in my life met somebody who claimed that yellow is a primary color. The fact that this could be a thing puzzles me beyond believe.
"Artists traditionally" is doing a bit of heavy lifting here. Neither artists nor art teachers explain a concept that all colours can be mixed from RBY primaries for the simple reason that the jig is up the moment they start painting. Rather artists very loosely describe these colours as primaries as a starting point to the concept of mixing colour.
In actual art classes they teach the colour wheel, which usually leads to around 6 colours being used for general painting in addition to white and other colours to darken. They're also not super fixated on what these colours should be specifically instead using terms such as "warm red and cool red", "warm blue and cool blue" etc. There is always a constant recognition that these will still present a limited gamut and that may be a deliberate artistic choice.
There is also an understanding that additional paints may be needed for getting a stronger colour or simply the convenience of not having to mix so much. This thinking continues through into professional printing hence the Pantone system or more interestingly with certain Epson printers that can include ink tanks specifically for violet, green, orange (amongst many others) - where the software will do the heavy lifting of blending these colours with the CMY model to produce a vivid gamut.
On the topic of "Key". Key is the pigment used to introduce detail and tone. For a two colour artwork the Key could simply be the darker of the two shades. We know it as black, but in some print processes it's an imperfect black-like colour that blends well with CMY to produce detail. Again in those Epson printers mentioned earlier, multiple blacks are used depending if it is to be used for creating detail in the coloured areas or simply as a block of black.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 29.1 ms ] threadBut as for what the article actually does focus on, I absolutely agree. You can create some really striking art by restricting your gamut to the range you can cover with a particular set of pigments.
For more on basic color terms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term#Basic_color_terms
Besides these 6 words, 2 more words are useful for naming saturated colors. The use of the word "violet" is widespread enough that it should be added to the list as a basic English color term.
The distinction between violet and purple is that while both are mixtures of red and blue, violet contains a small enough amount of red that it can be matched by a monochromatic color in the violet range of the spectrum, while purple contains an amount of red that is great enough so that it can be matched only by a mixture of monochromatic red with monochromatic blue.
A word is needed for the blue-green color. Cyan is a misnomer that should be avoided, but "turquoise" is a word that has been used in English for many centuries for designating the blue-green color (and which is used for the same purpose in many other European languages, all of which have borrowed the word from French, like also English). "Teal" is another synonym for "blue-green", which has been introduced in the 20th century.
There have been many misunderstandings about the words used by Isaac Newton for his circle of colors, but I believe that when his words are interpreted correctly, he was right.
Isaac Newton has divided the saturated colors into 8 colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blew or blue, indico or indigo, violet and purple. The first 7 of these were classified as prismatic colors, i.e. as monochromatic colors.
Isaac Newton spelled blue as both "blew" and "blue", and also indigo was spelled as both "indico" and "indigo". While the meaning of the other color words is not ambiguous, the meaning of these 2 words is not clear.
The words used by Isaac Newton were the names of some paints, whose hue he compared with the colors obtained by the dispersion of the solar light. The "indico" paint was presumably made with the indigo pigment, so it must have been blue.
The "blew" or "blue" of Isaac Newton was the color of the "blue Bise" paint. "Bise" is more frequently spelled "bice" and it was the name of a paint based on copper carbonate. Depending on the exact details of its method of preparation, such a paint will contain a mixture of malachite and azurite pigments, so it might have any hue between green and blue. We do not know who was Newton's paint supplier or any other details about the paint used by Newton, so it cannot be known for sure which was the real color of Newton's "blew".
Nevertheless I assume that Newton's "blue Bise" was actually a blue-green paint, because only in this case Newton's classification of the saturated colors will make perfect sense, because blue-green and blue are distinctive enough to deserve to have their own names.
So translated into modern English, the 8 saturated colors of Isaac Newton would be: red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, blue, violet and purple. This classification remains right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinotopia
I don’t understand why we can’t teach the color wheel as a true wheel.
But then again I recently said to a friend that “primary colors is just a social construct” and that didn’t go so well…
Decimal is not universal. Not seconds, not meters, not sound frequencies used for communication, not colors. Our sky isn’t blue, it’s purple. Ask any bee and they’ll tell you. But hydrogen glows at very specific colors and that only changes if you are moving fast enough.
The fundamental colors are the colors of the elements and, I might argue, their oxides. As reflected by light or when they incandesce. Gold. Rust. Arsenic green. Carbon black. Maybe the emission bands of noble gases, though those are hardly every day items.
(If I were a very clever alien though, and I discovered exotic states of matter where the elements behaved differently, and I only wanted to talk to other very clever aliens, I might use those instead to talk over the heads of the younger or dumber species, which is why I stopped contributing to SETI. We are looking under the wrong rocks, IMO).
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CIE1931xy_gamut_comp...
In actual art classes they teach the colour wheel, which usually leads to around 6 colours being used for general painting in addition to white and other colours to darken. They're also not super fixated on what these colours should be specifically instead using terms such as "warm red and cool red", "warm blue and cool blue" etc. There is always a constant recognition that these will still present a limited gamut and that may be a deliberate artistic choice.
There is also an understanding that additional paints may be needed for getting a stronger colour or simply the convenience of not having to mix so much. This thinking continues through into professional printing hence the Pantone system or more interestingly with certain Epson printers that can include ink tanks specifically for violet, green, orange (amongst many others) - where the software will do the heavy lifting of blending these colours with the CMY model to produce a vivid gamut.
On the topic of "Key". Key is the pigment used to introduce detail and tone. For a two colour artwork the Key could simply be the darker of the two shades. We know it as black, but in some print processes it's an imperfect black-like colour that blends well with CMY to produce detail. Again in those Epson printers mentioned earlier, multiple blacks are used depending if it is to be used for creating detail in the coloured areas or simply as a block of black.