While I’ve been impressed by my intuition around color this term, part of me has wanted to understand the mechanisms of color mixing at a much deeper technical level.

One of the things The Heartbeat of Trees made clear is that red light rays + green light rays = yellow. This made absolutely no sense to me because any time I’ve mixed those two paint colors, I’ve ended up with brown.

So I did what any good Zellenial would do: I Googled “mixing red and green light.” I needed a visual to help my brain catch up.

This image came up in the search, and the visual and underlying explanation suddenly everything made much more sense.

Light rays and the colors they form operate through additive color mixing. Paint, on the other hand, works through subtractive color mixing, which is an entirely different process. This alone explained the moments where my “Photoshop brain” and my “painting brain” were at war.

In Photoshop, I understood color as a balance of Hue, Saturation, and Brightness, and I carried that framework into painting. Hue was simply the perceived color; green, purple, orange, etc, that moved through the spectrum of magenta → red → orange → yellow → green → blue → indigo → violet → magenta again. So if I wanted to push my blue closer to indigo, I’d add a touch of red, magenta, or pink until it leaned in that direction.

Brightness and Saturation, however, were harder to translate. Both white and black paint decrease saturation, which made it challenging to keep colors vivid. I figured it out most of the time, but every now and then I hit a wall. A recent example: trying to replicate the vibrant jade on the bottom fabric of my Base Room installation. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get that “punch.” I simply didn’t have a blue with enough inherent saturation to make it possible.

A similar frustration came up when I tried to mix a deep, blood-like red. Adding a touch of black, which normally deepens colors in digital workflows, made the paint muddy and brown. I had to add several layers of paint to make it look vibrant again, and even then it wasn’t quite right.

When I scrolled a little further down on my Google search, I found this graphic: red, green, and blue light overlapping in a three-circle Venn diagram.

 

My brain immediately went: Wait a damn minute… that looks like CMY in the center and RGB around the outside.

I was today years old when I finally understood why RGB is the primary color system for screens and CMYK is the standard for print.

Growing up, I was taught the classic trio of “primary colors”: red, yellow, and blue. Sometimes people included white and black, although many insisted those “weren’t real colors.” That system stuck with me. How could someone make red without red? Didn’t primary colors have to stand alone?

We always mixed red and white to make pink, magenta’s nearest relative, so the idea that you could create red from magenta + yellow felt impossible. I even talked with my mother about it, and she joked, “This is almost as bad as Christopher ‘discovering’ America.” Misinformation and miseducation run deep, especially when long-standing cultural traditions contradict the science.

It’s wild to realize that this preschool-level understanding shaped my entire relationship with color. Psychologically, it tracks. Yet I could’ve been painting with cyan, magenta, and yellow a long time ago. This also ties back to Peter Wohlleben’s point in The Heartbeat of Trees: culture has a profound influence on how we see and experience color.

The idea that magenta and yellow could produce a rich red broke my brain in the best way. As someone who never took a formal color theory class, my approach to color has always been guided by intuition, vibrancy, and emotional response. Only recently have I started trying to understand the underlying logic.

So today I put it all to the test. I tried mixing magenta and yellow paint to create the red I’d struggled with earlier. After about a minute of stirring, ta-da! The experiment worked. I was stunned to get a rich, earthy, deep red — a red I’ve never attempted to “mix” before. Here are the results: the new version (left), made in a single layer, combining magenta, yellow, and a tiny bit of black — versus the earlier attempt (right), which took several passes and still needed watered-down red to regain vibrancy.

The difference felt like a revelation.

Understanding additive vs. subtractive color mixing is something I’m ready to put into immediate practice. It will make producing certain colors far easier in paint, and it gives me new ways of thinking about digital color workflows too. Strangely enough, I feel more equipped now to navigate color both on and off the screen. 

It’s funny how theory clicks so cleanly after years of stumbling through practice. I’ll try making “Blue” next.