if black is the absence of color and white is all the color how do they make black and white paint?
In: Chemistry
There are 2 main ways to make color. With light, and with pigment.
Light [monitors/TVs] (RGB) the more colour you add, the more light you add. Eventually when you fully saturate all colours it becomes bright white.
Pigment [ink/paint] (CMYK) adding more color makes it darker. When all colours are saturated it becomes black.
So with paint it’d technically be opposite of what you’re saying, but some Paints might be made from pigments extracted from elements that may be pure white or black and not a combination of color. The black absence and all white theory may not exactly work in this situation.
We are actually talking about two concepts here. Light and Pigmentation.
So with Light White light is made of every color on the visual spectrum and darkness is the absence of all light.
With Pigment paints and waxes are dyed with color powders to give them the desired color. White is either made with a white material or it just happens to be what color the mixture ends up being with nothing added. The reason why we get black is the same although it can also be achieved by adding multiple colors due to them darkening eachother to that point.
Basically White Light is all the colors but White Paint is usually none of them. The reason is because you have to dye paint to get colors of paint where as you need to separate light to change its color.
White paint has to reflect pretty much all the colored light that hits it; they normally make that with titanium oxide.
When you look at white material under full-spectrum light, your eye gets hit by all the colors and registers that as white.
Black paint has to be highly light-absorbent, so that no matter what light lands on it, almost none bounces off. When you look at black material under any kind of light, your eye receives basically-no-color-at-all and registers that as black.
You can make black paint by combining various other colors, because for example red paint = “reflects red, absorbs other colors”. If you mix red, green and blue paints, the mixture should end up absorbing pretty much everything. If you don’t want to mix black, you can make it using carbon powder, or powdered magnetite (Fe3O4).
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