Mountain-Dealer8996 t1_iue7ze8 wrote on October 30, 2022 at 5:40 PM

Reply to comment by PaperReadingGuy in [OC] The average colour of each European country flag. by kate1hepuppy

No, it’s not the case that mixing equal portions of red pigment and white pigment gets you a color that is perceptually mid-way between the red and white. You might get something that looks “closer” to the red or looks closer to the white. I actually have talked about this with quite a few artists. Josef Albers (abstract expressionist painter) wrote a whole book on this topic, and other non-linearities in color perception. Personally, I did my PhD thesis on the neuroscience of color perception.

PaperReadingGuy t1_iuf70wl wrote on October 30, 2022 at 9:31 PM

I'm sorry, you could be right, but walk me through here.

If I pay an artist with brush-canvas-and-palette to mix red and white such that he can arrive at a color that is the average of the quantities of red and white on the Switzerland flag, are you saying he couldn't do that by eyeballing it?

Or are you saying he couldn't do that mechanically automatically by just mixing the exact amounts of red and white on the Switzerland flag without eyeballing it?

If you're saying the latter, that it's not automatic and the proportions are not the same as on the original flag, I could believe you, but you haven't said anything that would cause me to believe that.

If you're saying the former, there's no way I can believe in that, because then every art book on colors would have to make a major pause in explaining colors to tell me what you're trying to tell me, and no art color book does that.

Therefore it seems to me that brush-canvas-and-palette artists can totally do what you are saying can't be done - otherwise how were all the paintings that the world has accumulated in museums painted?