Mr. Hydroxyl

Listen up you fucks because I’m not wasting thousands of dollars on an art degree to watch y’all fuck up basic color theory.

Red, yellow, and blue are the primary colors

If you’re using p i g m e n t.

Do you hear me? When you’re using traditional media, fucking actual goddamn paint, Bob Ross style, your primary colors are!

When you use paint, your primary colors are red yellow and blue and don’t forget it.

NOW THAT CHANGES COMPLETELY WHEN YOU GO FUCKING DIGITAL.

THE DIGITAL PRIMARY COLORS ARE RED BLUE AND GREEN IF AND ONLY IF YOUR WORK IS GOING TO STAY DIGITAL, ON THE SCREEN, AND NEVER LEAVE THE SCREEN, AND OF COURSE IF YOUR WORK IS GOING TO BE PRINTED. ON A PRINTER. WITH INK. THEN. AND O N L Y  T H E N.

ARE YOUR PRIMARY COLORS.

CYAN. 

MAGENTA.

AND YELLOW.

So say it with me folks!

Red yellow and blue, are the primary colors for traditional pigment that’s mostly used in paints and shit. You use red yellow and blue when you’re painting traditionally, Bob Ross style. 

Red blue and green is light, which is what you’re painting with when you pick up your tablet and go digital.

CMYK is ink, and ink only. You could use cyan, magenta, and yellow as your primary colors in paint if you wanted to be a complete dick, but they’re not your primary colors unless your work is going to be printed using. i n k. The only time they could be considered the primary colors in a traditional medium is if you’re using ink.

Is my icon. I painted this using RED. GREEN. AND BLUE. AS MY PRIMARY COLORS and they turned out fine. Of course, I used the finger smudge tool first and then the color mixing tool and then the blur tool, but hey what do I know.

Clearly using the blur tool only doesn’t cut it.

“Oh but Leo!” You say. “You used cyan and magenta in that color wheel!”

Well bitch guess what.

this is the digital color wheel. I’d say I mimicked that pretty well, don’t you think?

Oh and one other thing, notice how Blue and Yellow are directly opposite each other on this color wheel? That’s because we’re dealing with light, and with light, yellow and blue are complimentary colors.

Which is why when you mix them, it looks like this:

Which is a pretty neutral gray tone: They cancel each other out on the rgb color wheel when you mix them together.

BUT WITH PIGMENT THE PLACEMENT IS DIFFERENT

If you’ll notice, yellow and violet are now opposite each other, meaning they’re complimentary colors and if you mix  them, they’ll make a neutral gray.

But if you mix yellow and blue, same colors as before, YOU GET THIS:

Now keep in mind that the person in the video uses a darker blue, so they get a darker green, but the point is that it doesn’t make that neutral gray.

Now what happens when we mix yellow and violet paint?

Ah yes, you get a bunch of muted colors the more evenly you mix them.

What happens when you mix yellow light and purple light?

The reason the primary colors for light are so dramatically different from the primary colors for paint and ink is because your eye only receives combinations of red light, blue light, and green light. Our eyes do not have a sensor (cone cell) for yellow light. So when we paint with light, red green and blue are our primary colors. Because of our eyes.

Furthermore, paint primary colors are colors that cannot be created by mixing other colors together. For paint, they are red yellow and blue, because you cannot mix orange and green to get yellow. Mixing orange and purple paint does not make red. And mixing green and purple paint does not make blue.

Mixing blue and green paints will make cyan. Mixing red and blue paints will make magenta.

That’s why cyan and magenta aren’t primary paint colors.

However, you can’t mix yellow and blue ink and get cyan. You can’t mix red and blue ink to get magenta.

And that’s why cyan and magenta are the primary ink colors.

Brighter and stronger paints are created through tints and shades, through a thorough understanding of color theory and a few quality paint recipes. Not by bullshit posts on tumblr designed to mislead you.