I remember in elementary school that I was mixing paints and to make grey, and I found that a small quantity of black darkens white super easily whereas even a 50-50 split of black and white leaves an almost black color. Is black paint more potent? Is there some kind of complicated color theory?
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If white is put on a completely dry dark surface, or dark on a completely dry white surface, the difference between the two will be none.
Now if they are both liquid, I assume it goes like this:
White is absolutely clean/nothing/0 color
Dark color is something that has already been added to white.
So adding dark to clean white (imagin white is the ‘nothing’ point) just becomes dark again
While if you add white to black, now you start taking an average of the Dark (White+Dark) and the White your’e adding. And since the dark will never completely disappear from the average equation, it will never become perfect white, whereas white will become dark as it’s like the 0/nothing point.
Basically
Dark->White = (Dark + White)/Total volume = Will never be white completely
White->Dark = (0 + Dark)/Total volume = Can become dark completely since white is the the 0/no color/nothing/starting point
Consider that a thin enough layer of paint is basically see-through.
Since the material isn’t 100% opaque, you can imagine paint molecules receiving light from two directions: light from the environment, and light reflected by neighboring paint.
As a milky, matte substance, the paint reflects light more-or-less in random directions. So most of the light which returns back to the environment from this material has been reflected numerous times within the paint.
So the light you see has basically gone through a chain, which is only as strong as its weakest link. Whenever one of these paths includes a pigment, the light is affected/absorbed. The only way to reflect whiteness/brightness is if every molecule in the random path has been reflective instead of pigmented.
Aren’t you talking about the same paint? If you know that “a small quantity of black” makes grey, then why would you be surprised that adding more black makes “an almost black color”? The paint doesn’t care which one you think you’re changing – it’s all mixed together.
Paint color works by removing light, adding just a small amount of black pigment can darken white pigment a lot because it goes from absorbing ~0 light to more . But to lighten dark pigment you can only dilute the pigment.
It’s a mistake to think that mixing paint is the same as mixing colors. Paints combined with each other chemically, have varying degrees of [opacity/transparency](https://www.vecteezy.com/vector-art/474551-english-opposite-word-opaque-and-transparent) etc. You can often mix paints to get something in between their colors, but due to their different chemical makeups, the result won’t always be the same as mixing those colors proportionately on say a computer screen. If I mixed all the paint colors of the rainbow together evenly, the result would probably be this grey brown. [If I painted those same colors on a wheel and spun it](https://youtu.be/lil4co0z7QA?t=71) the results are more white
In the case of your black/white mixture, just a little bit of transparency in the white pigment elements allows light to shine through it for an extra chance to be absorbed by the black pigment, which tends to be more opaque. This makes the mixture lean more towards the black end because the black most often wins out with deciding what to do with a light photon that hits it.
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Adding pigment to paint is easy. Subtracting pigment from paint is not. You can only try to neutralize it.
It’s called the “cornsweet illusion”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.star1045.com.au/best-of-the-web/optical-illusion-will-melt-your-brain/%3famp
The 50/50 mix appeared closer to black because it was contrasted against white paper (or the white dish you were mixing it in).
If you were painting on black paper, the opposite would happen and the 50/50 mix would appear a very light grey.
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