Mixing red, blue and green paint, we get black.?

Question

When we mixed red, blue and gree light, we get white light. When we mixed red, blue and green paint, we get black paint. Why?

Answer 1

Your eye interprets a mixture of red, blue and green light as white light because your brain is programmed as such.

Now for red paint. It's colour is red because the paint absorbs out of white light (= red+blue+gree) all wavelenghts except red.
Blue paint absorbs red and green and reflects blue.
Green paint absorbs red and blue and reflects green.

Therefore a mixture of red, blue and green paint will absorb *all* wavelengths and scatter nothing back to your eye. The mixture appears black.

Answer 2

Good Question, however you are asking a How question when you really mean Why. Why do light particles bounce around and come out all complete white and why do the multitude of colors of the spectrum all become black when mixed (actually they turn to a muddy color but for the argument I will go along)? Perhaps it is a matter vs. energy thing. Paint is composed of dead stuff imitating living light particles. True Light is millions of atoms playing against each other. Not that I am a physicist at ALL. This is just top of my head conjecture as I sit at my computer decompressing my back after painting thirty art note-cards for my subcontracting business. But then of course the "smart people" flunked Einstien at sums in his primary education because he thought in a more intuitive way. Not that I am Einstien. My current battle is to unify the field of tidiness to work-time in my house. I lament the memory of physics I have studied here and there is only enough to know to turn the screw to the left in America to loosen it, and more than once I have to sing the righty-tighty-lefty-loosey cheat. So when the child asks Why is the sky Blue, you can't break it down further. Mechanics might tell you how, when is a calender marker. Why is more of an is thing, when the sky can speak for itself and say, "Because I felt like not being grey today." then you can say that is why the sky is Blue. Science is tool, a lovely fine tool, I don't worship it. I like the things it can do, I just don't put all my faith in it. I am sure the work that is being done with particle physics and quantum mechanics will help us with advanced lasers for lunar missions and medical applications and I wish I had the years and or the Intel dual core type processor brain that it would take to study light. As an artist I am all about the light. Thanks for making me stretch my brainpan a bit, hope I don't have to find a metric wrench for it.

Answer 3

When you mix red, blue, and green light you get white because of "additive" mixing... the wavelengths of light actually complement each other by constructive interference. This means that the colours in light can mix together and activate all of the corresponding cones in your retina.

In paints and other art supplies, when you mix red, blue and green, you are performing "subtractive" mixing. Essentially, you cause most of the wavelenghts of light to cancel out via destructive interference.

This is basic psychology

Answer 4

If you were using paint, actually you'd get BROWN mixing those three colors together.

The three primary colors are Red, Yellow and Blue. They are called Primary colors because they cannot be made by mixing any other colors together. This is in Art. In a color TV, the 3 colors are Red, Blue and Green, which is odd, since Green is made by mixing Blue and Yellow together.

White is the absense of color, Black the presense of ALL color.
We see a particular color because the properties of whatever we're looking at absorb all other colors EXCEPT the color we see. That color is reflected back to our eyes. You could say White ABSORBS all color, Black REFLECTS all color.

When you mix red, green and blue paint together, you are mixing chemicals which have different reflective properties. Mixing these three will give you a substance which absorbs almost no color, reflecting everything back to the viewer. This, of course, makes it appear to the viewer, that everything's black (or dark brown)

Answer 5

First of all white light is all colours. Ever done the experiment where you split it using a prism.

Anyway, The pigments reflect only certain colours and when you mix the primary colours you end up with a group of pigments that will reflect all colours but they are also absorbing the other colours which they dont reflect.

Answer 6

In light they must counter out each other. (I don't know for sure)
in paints and I paint allot
because red and green are opposite and blue most likely darken it. It normal dark with a slightly blue edge to it.
but as there are many degrees of red's it depents what one you use, and the same for greens and blues. If you use the wrong shade it has a whole different effected.

Answer 7

you didn't get black waht you got is most probably brown. . . .very dark brown. . . .red green and blue are natural colours . . . .and the addition of the colours will never give black. . . . . .black signifies the absenmce of colour produced by the non reflection of light into our eyes

Answer 8

black is total color