Your art teachers lied to you about the primary colors

[MikeW]

It's quite the opposite. When a white light is sent through a prism it diverges into colors, which means white is the presence of all colors combined on a surface.



Therefore, darkness means absence of light, it's characterized by black, absence of color.

Also, the 3 primary colors are red, blue and green. Mixed together they appear as white, while mixed in every specific quantity of each of them, they give all other colors.

That's additive color. What is true for additive color is not true for subtractive color, which is what the OP is talking about.

[cftxp]

So this thread kind of just reminded me of the dreaded part of every art class when I always go "UGH!" even though I usually remember the rules. That said, I've always been taught the additive RYB version in terms of how to discern the color families while my painting/drawing teacher has an entirely different system of teaching color theory (as an applied form). She made us do these repetitive color charts that time and time again we would refer to throughout the semester.

Strangely enough, she asked for mine (I guess the hues were tolerable for her) today, I should probably take a photo of them next class. But I had no idea about the reality of subtractive color (at least I have nothing in my usually dependable memory about this) but I guess you learn something new every day, even though it's technically the day after and you just spent almost 10 hours combined making art!

Perfect theme (I would say) for the Fourth of July at least. Do the same rules apply for fireworks?