– 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
Open up paint and select the pencil and the colour red and do every alternating pixel in a 10×10 grid red and the other pixels yellow, like [this](https://imgur.com/7doZ6tk)
Zoom out and you see orange
[Here](https://imgur.com/bOXM64g) is a larger 100×100 zoomed out, and [zoomed in](https://imgur.com/eX0RHPQ)
A similar thing is happening. The tiny tiny red pieces of paint and yellow pieces of paint aren’t making a piece of orange paint, they’re just blurred together when they get really small and our eyes blur them together to make orange.
The particles do not change. You aren’t even seeing the particles. What you see is the light reflected from them. The light reflected is what mixes together into a homogeneous colour.
I got a tattoo once and they mixed together two colors.
A few years later the brighter of the colors completely faded and only the second one was left.
It’s the same way tv lights work, the lights aren’t displaying the different colours (only red, green and blue) they are just so close together you’re eyes resolution isn’t great enough to tell the lights apart in the same way your eyes can’t tell the pigment particles from one another
In addition to the previous answers, many colourful things in nature are the result of multiple pigments interacting, and sometime non-pigmented colour with pigments, two create the final appearance of colour we see. There are several different chlorophyll pigments responsible for the green of plants (granted, most of them are in various greens) while there is no green or blue pigment to be found in birds, or indeed most other animals. Green feathers utilise yellow pigments, and stacks of microstructures that refract light between them until they emerge as blue iridescence.
Note also that other species see more, fewer, or difference colours in the light spectrum, and not all colours and patterns are meant for or possible to see seen by our eyes.
Imagine a bucket of black sand and a bucket of white sand. Pour them together and mix really well. It’s still black and white sand, but to your eye it will now appear gray. Same principle but with paint
The only way you can see anything without staring directly at a light source is for light to reflect off a surface to reach the light sensitive cells in the back of your eye.
– When you see green, it’s because only green light is reflecting to reach your eye. The other colors are absorbed.
– When you see red, it’s because only red light is reflecting to reach your eye.
– If both red and green light reflect to reach your eye, you see yellow.
– If red and blue reach your eye, you see magenta.
– If green and blue reach your eye, you see cyan.
– If all colors reach your eye, you see white, and if no colors reach your eye you see black.
Printer’s ink colors are called CMYK for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black. You might have learned in school that the “primary colors” of paint are red, yellow and blue, but they are actually magenta yellow and cyan.
If you mix red paint with blue paint then a little bit of red light will reflect to your eye and a little bit of blue light will reflect to your eye, and you will see purple.
I’m very surprised not to find rods and cones in the answers.
Our eyes contain what are called rods and cones. Rods are for night vision and cannot detect colors, so I won’t go into detail other than to say they represent 95% of the detectors in your eye and primarily fill the remainder of your eyes.
Cones are what detect color and are primarily used for day (bright) vision. There are three types of cones that each detect either red, green or blue (RGB). This is why monitors and televisions have clusters of “pixels” that target one of these cones in your eye.
Any other color you “see” is actually an interpretation your brain makes of the relative percentage of the amount of red, green and blue in what you are looking at. “White” is seen (interpreted) when there are roughly equal amounts of RGB, except when there is no red, green or blue, which is interpreted as “Black.”
Colors are either additive or subtractive. If a color source is creating light, like the sun, a light bulb, a monitor or a flash bulb then it is adding light frequencies that the eye sees. Adding different light frequencies will appear to make the objects shown become lighter until finally our eyes see “white” when all light frequencies are being created. A monitor will show specific frequencies and we see that as colors.
If a color source is reflecting light, like any object which is bouncing photons/light, then the color is subtractive. Assuming a percentage of all light frequencies are reflected with a “white” object then adding different pigments causes specific light frequencies to be absorbed to a certain degree. Our eyes see what remains and interprets that as “color”. If all frequencies are absorbed then we see that as black.
Imagine two piles of colored sand. Separately, they are each their own color. Mix them together, and the grains are still the same color, but when you look at them, they have blended together and the color has “changed”.
Paint pigment is much smaller, suspended in liquid, so you never see the ‘grains’ of pigment.
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