Spoiler alert: this is a technical article as much as a rant XD
Let's continue our series of intelligent discussions based on dumb comments!!!
From yesterday's video:
"9:24 I knew when I saw the thumbnail this mistake would be made. Red and Blue are not primary colours. The primary colours are Magenta, Cyan Yellow."
Edit - they guy apologised replying very kindly to my comment so now I feel super guilty for my assumptions... but whatever, it doesn't change the attitude and content of the first comment and the valid points we can take out from this!
Still, please don't bully the guy in the comments ;)
Let's take away the fact that he knew I was going to do something wrong before watching the video lol.
This is probably someone that made some quick digging into Colour Theory, found a new revolutionary idea immediately under the surface and got really really mad with his primary school teacher because he lied to him (he is actually a landscape painter so now I feel really really really bad about this joke... that I'm not going to delete lol)!
You know that I'm a firm supporter of the CMYK system.
Cyan, Magenta and Yellow are incredibly efficient pigments that with their physical mixing are able to create the widest range of high-chroma colors, waaaay larger then what you can obtain with Blue, Red and Yellow. This is pure objective tested math.
But CMYK is just one of many Colour Models that you can use in your work that you should consider like a Reference Frame or a physical Observational Reference Frame because... that's precisely what they are!!!!!!
They are your arbitrary point Zero, your x-y-z axis, your choice to analyse a physical event in an inertial or non-inertial optic, they are your choice of using D&D, Pathfinder or Blades in the Dark to simulate reality, in storytelling they are the single element that turns your universe in a parallel universe: Harry Potter, our world but magic is real, War of the Worlds, our world but aliens are real, Hellboy, our world but occult stuff is real, Marvell/DC universe. our world but superpowers are real, Dracula, our world but vampires are real...
I can't come up with more analogies at 8 am lol.
A Colour Model is a scientific absolute, an objective, mathematical and physical reality inside its own borders and confines, but it coexists with other models like saying that light is wave and particle at the same time!
But in painting a Colour Model is something totally relative that you CHOOSE as your set of basic rules: only when you set and accept them as your Reference Frame they become an internal absolute (and even in this case there are internal exceptions)!
The RGB system is an additive colour system that uses light as physical matter for its mixing and you are seeing it in action right now on your screen.
In this model Red, Green and Bue are primaries.
In the Zorn model (subtractive) your primaries are Yellow Ochre, Cadmium Red and Ivory Black and you accept them as your primaries only because their mixing creates a precise, particularly pleasant mood. A choice based only on taste and aesthetic but totally legit!
In one of my old videos I paint using traditional secondary tones as my primaries. I moved the mixing scale of a single step creating a new point zero just because I wanted a muted visual palette based on tertiary and quaternary hues.
RYB is a subtractive color model in which red, yellow, and blue pigments are considered primary colors. Less efficient than CMY? YES! I personally prefer to use CMY in my work? Absolutely! Invalid? NO!
Designer still consider red, yellow and blue as the three psychological primaries, with black and white (that technically are not even colours!!!) occasionally added as a fourth and fifth: they put themselves in a psychological Reference Frame because their are more interested in the aesthetic and emotional impact than the mixing efficiency (that's something the factory will have to solve!).
So to conclude with a philosophical note, in painting as in life, be always skeptical of immovable, absolute ideas, keep an elastic mindset and face every problem from multiple point of views!
(even only because you could be roasted in someone's article lol... again I'm really sorry for the rant... or not? Everything is relative, soooo... XD)