Hello! Just wondering why when I mix red and white it creates pink, instead of being red and white swirls? Same with if you mix a bunch of colors together it turns brown instead of seeing all the colors you mixed individually? Thank you!
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It’s mostly the way pigment works. But if you try to mix colors by spinning colors on as wheel it will create a completely different color than the color you would get when mixing pigment, because light mixes differently than pigment.
Assuming it’s actual paint in real life: it also depends on what medium the pigment is in. Like, if you have two colours that are using a similar waterbased medium, then those two colours will mix. If you have different types of medium, the colours might not mix.
The individual particles of each color are so small that your eye can’t distinguish them individually. So you’re seeing masses of red and white particles mixed together which your eye interprets as pink.
Imagine that you have two jars of marbles, one red and one white. You mix those together, you see red and white marbles. Now imagine you have two jars of sand, one dyed white and the other red. Mix those together and unless you’re really close, it will look like pink sand. When you’re talking dyes or pigments the actual color components are many orders of magnitude smaller than a grain of sand.
There are two different parts to your post:
> why when I mix red and white it creates pink
Once the red and white “swirls” are smaller than what your eye can resolve the mix of red and white reflected light gets interpreted as pink.
You can check that with a magnifying glass and your computer screen. You’ll see that white parts aren’t made of white pixels but tight bunches of red, green and blue. Various combinations of these three colors suffice to simulate a very wide range of colors as our eyes only have three receptors, precisely red, green and blue sensitive. (Other animals can have more than three, e. g. birds and some arthropods see colors we don’t even know exist. And others have less, which is the case for a lot of mammals, e. g. cats and dogs.)
> if you mix a bunch of colors together it turns brown
Only if you’re working with *subtractive* color synthesis. Suppose you mix green and red watercolor. The result will be the usual muddy brown you expect. The green dye absorbs red and blue and reflects green (quite evidently). The red one absorbs blue and green. Thus the mix absorbs all colors, but the dyes aren’t perfect so what remains looks dark but brownish.
On the other hand with *additive* synthesis, where it’s *light* of different colors which gets mixed, green + red will look bright yellow. Again this can be demonstrated with a computer screen by looking at the pixels of some yellow patch.
Wikipedia has a [page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_mixing) about that.
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