Just Three Colors for Any Hue or Yellow from Green and Red

This essay which compares subtractive and additive mixing of colors I wrote as an introduction assignment of an art online course.

This is a color wheel painted with oil paint. I used the three colors on the bottom of the painting to mix all the colors you can see. Now compare to a color wheel I have created while using light.

 

Note that the light colors are generally clearer. Note also that some of these colors are difficult to achieve with paint, for example the cyan blue just below the west direction. It is not for nothing that some artists decide to make artwork while using light, which gives the work something non-material.

I achieved this creation in Gimp an open source image editing software. When selecting a tool which uses color you can determine the color you need. You can do this by adjusting the values for the three color red, green and blue (RGB). For any color you can use values from 0 to 255. To mix yellow you need the highest values from green and red.

 

While watching the technique videos I realized I am still not tired being occupied with the color wheel. I loved watching the video where Anna Divinsky showed how to blend any hue from just three colors. I bought three oil paintings and tried myself.

An additional motivation for this post is that I am not only interested in traditional artwork but also in digital artwork. I remembered that there are two different ways of blending colors, the subtractive mixing of colors with paint and the additive mixing of color with light. The most intriguing fact for me was that when using light you can mix yellow from green and blue.

This also presents part of my past, where as a young woman I decided to become an engineer of physical techniques. We learned a lot about light and also about chemistry which is paint at its roots. These days I rarely combine artwork with my technical knowledge, but I thought to introduce myself this might be O.K.

Yet, is this really artwork?

Yes, it is and I hope you got the message right, which is artwork must not be extremely original like many people think, it can be just an interesting presentation of the color wheel.

I am really glad that no one can give me any grade for this claim :)