– What happens when an artist mixes paint for a painting? Are the pigments actually changing physically/chemically? What is actually happening to make the paints change color?

Question

– What happens when an artist mixes paint for a painting? Are the pigments actually changing physically/chemically? What is actually happening to make the paints change color?

In: 4221

Answer 1

Nope, they don’t react or change at all (except maybe in some rare cases with exotic pigments), they’re just mixing together very closely. Pigment particles are small, and your eye can only tell individual things apart if they’re above a certain size and distance from each other.

LCD screens are a good example of that, although light and paint mix in sightly different ways. Unless you’re an eagle, you probably can’t see red, green, and blue dots all over your screen, but that’s all you’re looking at. Combining those three colors together is enough to make (almost) every color your eye can see, and the dots are close enough that your eye can’t tell them apart, so you just see the mixture.