Keeping it simple
color and light
WARNING: Flashing lights ahead.
Earlier this week I began to wonder about color.
With paint, red, yellow, and blue the primary colors. You can make pairs of red, yellow, or blue to create the secondary colors of purple, orange, and green. If you mix all three primaries at once, you get a sort of muddy brown.
Light is as bit different. Red, green, and blue are the primary colors of light. You can mix red, green, and blue to create the secondary colors of light, magenta, cyan, and yellow. But if you shine all three of the primary colors of light on the same spot you won’t get a muddy brown, instead you’ll get white.
If you try to mix the primary colors of light using paint, you get a lot of mud. No cyan, no magenta, and certainly no white.
Screens use pixels made individually of red, green, and blue lights to display billions of colors. Each of those lights shine with varying intensity and your brain translates that signal into all the colors of the visual spectrum. Instead of seeing this:
You might see this instead:
WARNING: Flashing lights ahead!
All that theory led me to wonder. If pixels on a screen using only red, green, and blue light can flash fast enough to render all sorts of colors, can I do the same with paint? Can I use a physical medium like watercolor, scan it into a computer as frames in an animation, and get it rendering fast enough to behave like light?
I recall as a child having one of those activity boards with bells and knobs and noise makers. My favorite little distraction was a roller with red and blue stripes painted on it. If you spun it fast enough, the roller appeared purple.
Would a red, green, and blue circle, animated quickly enough, appear white?
No. At least not with the methods I’ve employed.
In the moment, this whole color experiment seemed like a pretty interesting thing to write about. I had expected to get the result I was expecting. When it became obvious that those expectations were not to be fulfilled I wondered what else I might be able to share. A Christmas tree with flashing lights came to mind (and into being) but if the above animation is any indication, let’s just say that the tree hurts to look at and I won’t subject you to it.
In the end sometimes it’s best to keep things simple. Even if the way there is anything but.
Hope your holidays have been and continue to be lovely. No matter how or what you choose to celebrate.