I know there’s a book called, “Blue and Yellow Don’t Make Green.” I’m not talking about that book. Well, sorta, in a roundabout way. I’m here to talk about colors a bit.

There’s this site I read quite a bit that has a lot of info about colors, written by some dude named Bruce MacEvoy. He seems to call bullshit on a lot of theory you see out there, and he’s a little arrogant himself, but what I like about him is that he’s actually done some experiments instead of just spouting theory. I really like how he showed the relationships on a color wheel, and how colors saturate/desaturate in a U-shape pattern when mixed. Then he actually got a mass spectrophotometer to measure wavelengths and plotted that on a curve!

http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/IMG/satcurve.gif

saturation curve

Magnificent data, and my #1 takeaway from this is that GREEN is actually a primary color because you can not make a bright green by mixing yellow and blue, and the graph is the proof. The more green you are, the lower the saturation. He even shows a mixed green vs. a tube green on a color wheel to show you the difference. And look how much separation there is between yellow and blue vs. the yellow and red.

I still like the “old masters” portrait palette of ochre, sienna, and black, but I also have been on a “cyan / magenta / yellow are the primary colors” kick, citing professional printing and computer technology as proof that CMYK works. And it does, but we don’t paint in pure, brilliant pigments in a halftone. But the proof is in the pudding, and I am swayed by rigorous, scientific evidence. The only downside I can see is that Bruce uses watercolors where I prefer oils. Not sure how much of a difference that will make.