LancesWorld.com Journal

I find the physics of light and color fascinating. And when you have an artist as a roommate you get to hear a lot about colors and their properties. Mike and I were talking about colors one day not too long ago and he handed me this book. This is a quick and easy book, it took me about an hour to read the whole thing. Did I read each and every word on each and every page? No, but I read it closely enough to have a better understanding of some of the different properties of colors and how they interact.

Everyone grows up learning that the three primary colors are Red, Yellow and Blue. In some way, this is true, but in reality, the "primary" colors all depend on the medium. Are we talking about light or paint? The computer age has replaced the color yellow with green (RGB color space) because red, green and blue are the primary additive colors. Light has an additive property - the more color you put in, the lighter the resulting color. Mix these three colors equally, and you get white. But any kid can tell you that mixing red, yellow (or green) and blue crayons won't give you white! The physics behind this is called subtractive color. Since we can't paint with light - except on the computer, kind of - a whole new process of color mixing has been developed by artists over the centuries. The new "primary colors" for an artist, then, cyan, magenta and yellow, which are complementary colors to red, green and blue, respectively.

"Color Theory" is written primarily for painters and other color artists, but I found it to be a very easy to understand exploration of how humans perceive color and how various colors interact. For example, while it is theoretically possible to create all the colors of the rainbow with the three primary colors (along with white and black), the technical application borders on impossible due to what this book calls the "gray trap."

Unless you are an artist, this is probably not a book worth buying, but if you find it at a local library or have a friend that owns a copy, I would recommend spending an hour or so with this book just for the intellectual thrill.