Today we will address another topic in a list of &#;things I&#;m kind of ashamed I don&#;t understand considering I am a professional scientist of sorts&#; (please make suggestions!).
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Why is it that when you mix light blue (cyan) and yellow paint you get green paint, but when you mix cyan and yellow light you get white light?
Unlike with yesterday&#;s analemma post, where I couldn&#;t find a satisfactory write-up on another blog, today&#;s blog is actually pretty nicely explained and beautifully illustrated here. I will crib their illustrations and summarize the explanations but it&#;s really out-and-out plagiarism for the moment.
First, you&#;ve got the so-called &#;hue wheel&#; (which sounds more sophisticated than &#;color wheel&#;, don&#;t you agree?):
This is illustrating the following. There are three basic pigments: yellow, cyan and magenta. There are three basic colors of light, namely green, blue, and red. And if you mix the fundamental pigments pair-wise (as in, you get paints and mix them) you get the fundamental colors of lights.
And vice versa as well, although this time you&#;re mixing as in splicing them together but keeping them separate, like we use pixels on our screen. This means, specifically, that you can combine green and red to get yellow. That&#;s majorly unbelievable until you see this miraculous picture, also from this webpage:
See how that works? I just can&#;t get over this picture. The little piece of yellow on the left is just stripes of green and red. Really incredible. The purple I get because it&#;s blue and red just like it&#;s supposed to be.
So, why?
The first thing to understand is that this isn&#;t just a relationship between us and the object we are looking at. It is instead a three-part relationship between us (or more specifically, our eyes), the object, and the sun (or some other source of light, but it&#;s more traditional in explanations like this to use fundamental, macho objects of nature like the sun).
Nothing can happen without a source of light. Which begs the question, what is light anyway? Again a picture stolen from here:
The prism separates the white light into various wavelengths, where red is at 700 nanometers and violet at 400 nanometers. More on the visible spectrum here. Note that the hidden difficulty here is why a prism does this, which is explained here.
So when an apple looks red to us, we have to imagine white light from the sun hitting that apple, and the key is that the skin of the apple is absorbing everything except the red light:
That thing on top is the sun, and the thing on bottom is your eyeball. The point is the red part of the light is reflected off the apple skin into your eye. And even though white light from the sun is the whole spectrum, we are denoting it when just the fundamental three colors of light because other colors can be made from those. And this can be corroborated by looking at your computer screen with a magnifying glass, where you will see that the white background is actually made up of little pixels of green, red, and blue.
By the way, we are again sidestepping the actual hard part here, namely why some surfaces such as apple skins reflect some colors like red. I have no idea. But I don&#;t feel as guilty about not understanding that.
Finally, back to the first question, of why cyan and yellow paint make green whereas cyan and yellow light make white. Turns out the light one is actually easier, since our second picture above shows us that yellow light is actually a mix of red and green, and when you add cyan, you now have all three fundamental colors of light, which gives us white light.
If you have cyan paint, then it is reflecting blue and green light, so absorbing red light. If you have yellow paint then that&#;s a material which is reflecting both green and red, so absorbing blue. For some weird reason (a third moment of stuffing things under the rug), the mixture of the paint is additive on absorbing things, so absorbs both blue and red, leaving only green reflected.
In the end we get a kind of mini De Morgan&#;s Law for color.
I&#;ve convinced myself that, modulo the following three questions I understand this explanation:
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Looking for the perfect white paint color? Stop looking at paint chips &#; just follow this one simple trick and you&#;ll get the best white paint color ever.
White paint is a tricky thing. There are literally hundreds of different shades when comparing all of the main paint brands. It&#;s exhausting to try to figure it all out. So I quit trying &#; and here&#;s what I learned.
Most people have a butcher they love, who will share his best secrets on how to make the best steak ever or that pork chop recipe that&#;s to die for. But me? I have a paint guy.
I buy a LOT of paint. So much, in fact, that my local paint store gives me a contractor discount. And I&#;m not a contractor &#; haha! They know this and just appreciate that I do all of my business at my little local Benjamin Moore store, so they&#;re good to me. I know all the guys there by name &#; I grew up with the owner and my husband grew up with the paint expert at the store. So Mike is my paint guy &#; any time I need help with figuring out something, I go see Mike. {btw &#; this is NOT a sponsored post}
Our living room was super dark before we gave it a makeover, so I decided that I wanted the brightest white paint I could find. After some research, I learned that Behr apparently makes the ultimate white paint color. I decided to take a gamble and try a paint that I never really used &#; but it&#;s Home Depot &#; how bad could it be? BIG MISTAKE. Although it was supposed to be one coat &#; after 4 coats on raw wood you could still see wood (we had to do some repair work after we ripped out the old fireplace). And on the areas where we had already painted previously with Benjamin Moore, it started bubbling up. There is NO reason this should have happened. We had clean walls and we were applying latex satin paint over latex eggshell. But it happened.
After a long discussion with Behr, we got a refund &#; then immediately headed to my beloved Benjamin Moore. Mike was at the counter and we had a discussion that went like this.
Me: Yo, Mike! How ya doin&#;, bud? Is there any way that we could add white pigment to white base to get a super white paint?
Mike: You want the best white paint color you&#;ll ever find?
Me: Yes, please!
Mike: You don&#;t want white pigment, you want one drop of black per gallon.
Me: [deadpan face &#; I was sure he was joking] Yeah&#;. ok. Seriously, can we add the white.
Mike: I&#;m dead serious. Add one drop of black pigment to it and you&#;ll get the best white paint color you&#;ve ever used. Sounds crazy, but I swear by it.
Me: Say whaaaa? Alright &#; I trust you. If that&#;s what you say is going to be the perfect white paint, then I&#;m down to try it. I need five gallons.
Mike: So we&#;re going to put 5 drops into the 5 gallons.
Me: Let&#;s do it.
He mixed up the paint, I brought it home and got to work. I&#;ve got to be honest and tell you that when we put the first coat over the Behr white, it seemed a bit gray. But I stayed the course and kept painting. And after two coats when it was all completely finished and dry, he was 100% dead on right. I&#;ll never look at another paint swatch &#; this is now my go-to white paint color that&#;s not really a paint color at all. It was honestly like he held the key to the best decorating secret I&#;ve ever learned. And no bubbling or issues at all. That&#;s why I love this paint.
So that, my friends is how to get the very best white paint color. Go see your Benjamin Moore guy and tell them you want one drop of black pigment into a white base to get the white paint. And if you&#;re realllllly lucky, you might find your very own Mike &#;