What about Color?

Color Theory:
To talk about color divorced from the medium necessarily means taking a theoretical approach.  So, we will digress for a moment.  The basics of color theory revolve around additive and subtractive light.

The primary colors for additive light are red, green and blue.  If three different lights are focused upon one spot, one light is covered with a filter of red, the second of green and the third blue, the spot will reveal white light.  The technologies of television, computer screens and color separation are all based upon additive light theory or RGB (red, green, blue).

The primary colors of subtractractive color theory are yellow, red, and blue.  Every young child learns this in kindergarden.  He/she learns quickly that yellow plus red makes orange, yellow plus blue makes green, red plus blue makes purple, and all three together create black (or a very mucky brown).

One further variation upon subtractive primary color theory is the primary colors of the printing industry.  Rather than the yellow, red and blue of kindergarten, the printing industry uses process yellow, magenta and cyan (and black).  Process yellow actually contains the slightest bit of green in it - a cool, translucent, lemon yellow.  Cyan is a translucent and dark turquoise kind of blue.  While magenta is a cool, translucent ruby red, similar to the external fleshy covering of pomegranate seeds.

Since painting occurs in the world of reflective light, subtractive color theory is used for color mixing.  However, which primary colors to use, kindergarten or printing industry?  Both, ultimately, since mixing a green, for example, renders a very different green depending on which yellow or which blue one uses.  Therefore, I like to keep a simple pallette of both cool and warm primaries, white, black plus basic earth tones.