Primary Colors

And the great battle over the true primary colors continues. It seems that there are alot of heated arguments over the internet about what the true primary colors are. Coming from a design and digital background, I tend to think that the subtractive primaries are cyan, magenta and yellow. Black has to be used to give you a full color range in print because, well, they are subtractive primaries and are brighter than the subtractive secondaries (red, green and blue). 

So I keep trying to prove my theory and it works quite well on a computer screen. If you look at the picture, the three middle mixes on the left are as close to using true cmy and rgb as a computer can do nowadays. If you mix these colors, you should get absolute grey. Now I mixed these using a tablet in Corel Painter, but they seem pretty close to all being the same. The problem comes when I try to repeat it with what Painter says are select oil colors. I used Cerulean Blue (should have used Light Cobalt Turquoise), Ultramarine Blue, Quinacridone Magenta, Cadmium Red, Cadmium Yellow Lemon and Pale Cadmium Green. These gave me more of a warm brown than a neutral gray. The problem is that there aren't many paints out there that can get the brilliance of Cyan and Magenta. They're just too far off the gamut for most reflected light. I guess objects aren't as great at absorbing red and green light as they are with other colors.

EDIT: Let me correct myself real quick. The problem isn't the saturation. The problem is the hue. If I could find paints that are somewhere within the given hue of magenta and cyan, I could make a better color wheel, even if these paints were somewhat desaturated. True, I couldn't mix as many variations of color with desaturated subtractive primaries, but I could at least see if they would make gray if I mixed them with green or red.

In my mind, it seems better to think about color as something made up in our brains when our eyes register light. In reality, the true color wheel (the additive color wheel) would have red, green and blue as primaries. These prismal colors mix to make the rainbow: red, (orange is a tertiary) yellow, green, cyan, blue. Magenta isn't seen in a rainbow because red and blue light never combine into the brighter magenta because they are at the opposite sides of the rainbow. If artists can stop thinking in subtractive color, and start thinking in additive (keeping in mind the process of light being absorbed in their paints) maybe they can make better paint mixtures. I realize that it all comes down to experience and knowing what paints to mix to create your own greys, browns and desaturated pigments, but maybe these ideas will help with estimations for newer artists.

Feel free to leave comments. I'm not married to this idea, but it's something that i've been trying to work on as I paint. Also, keep in mind that RGB red is a warm (orangish) red and blue is a warm (somewhat violet) blue.