 Welcome to Art Class and the truth about understanding color and it really is all about light. If you're an artist like me, I know you're fascinated with color. It's what draws us to our beautiful world and creates in us a desire to try to represent our world around us. Now there are two main divisions within the knowledge of color. One is additive and one is subtractive color. These used to confuse me until I realized it's all about the light. So I hope you enjoyed this presentation and some of you may even have your minds blown when you learn the truth about color. Now let's talk about additive color and keep in mind it's all about the light. Who recalls older TV sets? I know I do, the old tube television sets. And as a kid, did any of you get real close to the screen? I certainly did. And I noticed the thousands of little dots that were made up of the colors red, green and blue. And I was fascinated when I realized just these three colors make every color that I saw on my TV screen. So let's talk about additive color in light. The three primary additive colors are red, green and blue. Now remember when I said it's all about the light? We're adding light. When you combine any of these two or three together, you're increasing the light. We're getting a lighter resulting color than the original colors. Now let's talk about these color combinations. As you saw before, when we add the colors green and blue, the resulting color is a lighter cyan it's called. It's a beautiful kind of a turquoise color. Now when we add the colors green and red, we get yellow. And this yellow, if you notice if you can see on your screen, is actually lighter than the two original colors. Now what happens if we were to add all three together? You may notice at the bottom, the last two that weren't combined were the ones that make magenta. That's the red and the blue. But look at the center. It is pure white light. So that may help you to understand that we are adding light when we add additive colors together. And in understanding additive color, it may help to consider the source or the origin of that color. And it is the original pure white light that literally contains every color in the spectrum. Now let's talk about subtractive color. It also is about the light, but it's about subtracting the light. And subtractive color is what we find in pigment or things of the earth when we mix them as opposed to things of light as an additive color. But it's still about the light. Let's talk about the three traditional primary colors of red, yellow, and blue. When these colors are combined, the resulting secondary color is actually darker in color. And thus, subtracting the light. Remember it's all about the light. Many of us remember in school how we mixed all of these supposed primary colors together to get black. Subtracting the light. But what if I was to tell you that these original colors were taught in school of red, yellow, and blue as the primary colors in pigment is wrong? Okay, what is she talking about? If these aren't the primary colors in pigment, what are they? Well, just like we used the TV example for additive color, let's use the example of printer ink cartridges when describing subtractive color. I'm sure many of us have loaded our printers and noticed that the colors, hmm, they're not the traditional primary colors, but instead they are cyan, magenta, and yellow. And often black is used in the printing process. I learned early in my graphic design career that these were the colors that were used for printing. And yes, the true primary colors in subtractive color. Now let's go into subtractive color, keeping in mind that we are subtracting light as we are adding these true primary colors together. Now let's see the color combinations we get from cyan, magenta, and yellow. Looky there. The secondary colors in this example are the same that are in light of the red, blue, and green. And you can also see in the middle the color black, subtracting light when adding all three together. So does this mean we need to get rid of our traditional color wheels? I mean, after all, I talk about my pocket color wheel all the time when creating videos. No, but I do think understanding color correctly will only enhance your abilities as an artist. And I hope this video has increased your knowledge about the differences between additive and subtractive color. Put quite succinctly, additive color adds light and creates a brighter result in color. Subtractive color takes away light and is the color used in pigment. Now if you don't want to hear my deeper philosophical thinking here, you can respectfully just end the video. However, I find it quite spiritual actually that light is the source of all of the beautiful colors we see and that it is divided into a trinity of colors, which when combined somewhat spiritually create perfect white light. And contrary to this with subtractive color and pigment, when combined the things of the earth result in a darkness void of life and light. So as artists, we can look to the light and create from the beautiful palette of colors that we see around us. So I hope you enjoyed that little education about color and my patrons will receive a first look at this video. And if you'd like to become a patron, you can do so at this link. Happy painting!