ChrisH407

In my color-mixing videos, I demonstrate that magenta and cyan succeed as primary colors while red and blue fail. 

While earning a bachelor's degree in chemistry at UC Riverside, I took art classes as electives. I was taught to use a split-primary palette in my 1982 painting class there, years before Michael Wilcox's book on the topic was published. Yet I found that mixing the color fuchsia was still out of reach. A friend who knew all about color photographic printing got me started thinking about cyan, magenta, and yellow. The trouble was that paint manufacturers had not gotten the memo. They of course make what will sell. They're businesses after all, and need to make a living just like the rest of us. 

I've been amazed at how durable the split-primary myth has been over the years. I hope to cover this in more depth soon.