Abstract Thursday: "Natural Surprise"

Ingeborg has set us a real corker of a challenge for Abstract Thursday this week - "Natural Surprise"!

Along with most other kids, when I was little I played with my paint set and learned about the primary colours of red, yellow and blue, and how mixing them produced the following:

Red & yellow: orange
Red & blue: purple
Blue and yellow: green
All three: mucky brown!

The natural world had a real surprise in store for me when I studied the physics of light at senior school. I discovered that the primary colours were different when mixing light of different colours - now they were red, green and blue. And what's more, mixing the colours was different:

Red and green: yellow
Red and blue: magenta (OK, that's a bit like a light purple - phew!)
Blue and green: cyan
All three: WHITE!!

This was scary stuff. In some ways it still is. It gets even more scary when you realise that although the traditional primary colors that painters have used are red, yellow, and blue, modern printing press primary colors are magenta, yellow, and cyan. If you want more on this, look at this link here.


Today's image started off as a photo of a sheet of paper on which I'd painted the traditional primary colours in 3 circles, with their mixed colours in the appropriate interlocking areas. I'm afraid I confess to mocking up the right side of the picture in Photoshop, but I couldn't really think of a way of showing mixing of coloured lights without a lot of fuss - and coloured torches which I don't have.

(PS  Later on 9th November: See the comment string with gen2 below. It was quite right that I hadn't got the colour of the magenta correct on the right-hand side of the photo. I've now corrected this following gen2's excellent advice!)