Color is amazing. And holy shit is it complex! What seems so innocent and simple (and we usually take for granted) is ridiculously crazy. And even harder is researching color and actually making sense of it. In fact, color can be downright esoteric, avant-garde, incredibly weird, and, some would argue, spiritual. But aside from all that brainiac shit, look at what we’ve done with color! It’s incredible what artists do everyday with color. Walk through an art gallery and one can’t help but be amazed at (or afraid of) what people have done with color. Leonardo DaVinci and the Mona Lisa: WOW! We’ll never get to the bottom of how Leonardo mixed and placed pigments on a piece of canvas!
But this stupid blog/lecture is about teaching color (lucky me). And how the fork do I do that? Well, some really smart people (that would NOT be me) came up with theories about color. I am certainly not going to get into the intricacies of color theories cuz I will severely fork that up. So, I shall try to keep things simple (I love a little saying from our friend Winnie the Pooh who was brought to life by A.A. Milne: “It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn’t use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like, ‘What about lunch?’”).
Now, my blog/lecture has a whole bunch of cheesy and hokey shit in it. However, I put a whole lot of time and effort into that cheesy and hokey shit. Most of the pictures/photographs and “art work” are my own. So I ask that people please be kind as to what they do with my intellectual property (Notice of Copyright: Copyright © 2020. Patrick James Knapp Jr, BS, DDS, MDR. All rights reserved. No part of this presentation may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission of Patrick James Knapp Jr, BS, DDS, MDR.). Also, unless otherwise stated my reference is: Rosenstiel, S.F., Land, M.F., & Fujimoto, J. (2016). Contemporary fixed prosthodontics (5th ed.) (pp. 624-640), St. Louis, MO: Elsevier.
Color theory. What the heck is color theory? Well, the good folks at Wikipedia have an answer for that: “In the visual arts, color theory or colour theory is a body of practical guidance to color mixing and the visual effects of a specific color combination.” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_theory). And I feel like the most important bullet point from this definition is COLOR MIXING. Color mixing can be really WEIRD! And the ensuing VISUAL EFFECTS from color mixing can be equally as weird, frustrating, NOT intuitive, yet STUNNING under the right conditions and circumstances. So, if we’re going to do anything with color we have to know a little bit about color mixing and what the fork happens when we mix colors (that would be the visual effect/s).
Now there are TWO different types of COLOR MIXING. The first type of COLOR MIXING is called ADDITIVE COLOR MIXING. Huh? Yeah. This is the type of COLOR MIXING where we mix wavelengths of LIGHT. Put simply, this is the color mixing that gives us all the colors we see in things like televisions, computer monitors, iPhones, iPads, stage lighting (yes, even Hamilton on Broadway), etc. And how the fork do we even start to mix wavelengths of light? Simply, we start with primary colors. Three primary colors to be exact. RED, BLUE, and GREEN. And what’s totally nutz is we can mix varying levels of the three primary colors to make EVERY forking color! And, if we mix EQUAL amounts of all three additive primary colors we get WHITE! What’s even more whacked is that WHITE light contains EVERY wavelength known to the human race (split white light with a prism and ALL the wavelengths of color/light shoot out of that prism). Now you’re probably wondering why the fork we call it ADDITIVE COLOR MIXING? Keeping in mind that our three primary colors mixed together give us white light. And also keeping in mind that white light contains EVERY wavelength of color/light known to the human race. Then let’s think of additive color mixing as this: we’re mixing three unique/different colors of light, each with their own unique/different wavelengths, in order to yield MANY more wavelengths (white light contains every wavelength of light/color known to the human race), and so we say that we have ADDED wavelengths together (cuz white light is the resulting color and white contains EVERY wavelength). Additive color mixing. Mixing light.
Our second type of color mixing is called SUBTRACTIVE COLOR MIXING. And this is the type of COLOR MIXING where we are mixing pigments and dyes. This is what we use in dentistry. It’s also what we use in arts, ceramics, painting, photography, paint mixing, textiles, dental materials, etc. And just like in additive color mixing we have three primary colors. RED, BLUE, and…YELLOW. But these are actually the OLD SCHOOL subtractive primary colors. For reasons that I don’t want to get into (because I’ll probably just fork it up) the new subtractive primary colors are CYAN, MAGENTA, and YELLOW. You know these colors well because you’re always having to add these forking expensive pigments to your color printer. But, like dentistry, old habits die hard and much of the dental and art world are still using the OLD SCHOOL subtractive primary colors of RED, BLUE, and YELLOW. Now, subtractive color mixing works a bit like additive color mixing but with a few stark differences. As with additive, the three primary subtractive primary colors can be mixed in varying quantities to make EVERY color. And we can mix equal levels of all three subtractive primary colors to come up with something. BUT that something is NOT white. It’s BLACK and that is the stark difference between additive color mixing and subtractive color mixing (aside from the fact that we’re mixing pigments versus light).
Black is very cool. Black ABSORBS ALL WAVELENGTHS and reflects back NOTHING! Nothing escapes black. Just like a black hole, light and its energetic photons can not and do not escape from black (more on photons and wavelengths and Einstein stuff at a different time). So if there are no escaping energetic photons then we get zero photons entering our eyes and subsequently zero retinal stimulation in our eyes. No retinal stimulation in our eyes means zero visual signal going to our brains. And therefore we see NOTHING when we’re seeing black. Black has zero wavelength and zero photons. Where does that energy go? How the fork do I know? Maybe heat? Einstein knows but he ain’t talkin’ no more.
And so why do we say subtractive color mixing? Because we’re mixing TWO or MORE different colored pigments, each with unique/different wavelengths, to get only ONE or NO wavelength. So we have SUBTRACTED wavelengths. We’re going from several wavelengths to one or no wavelength. SUBTRACTIVE. And please remember that a pigment is something that absorbs ALL wavelengths of light and reflects back ONE WAVELENGTH ONLY and that one wavelength is the color we actually see.
Much, much more on subtractive color mixing and wavelengths and photons and other shit (like physics) in a future blog. Stay tuned.
Doc's Writing Refuge 