Van Gough used oil, Cézanne used watercolour, Ofili uses elephant dung. At Red Green & Blue, we paint with light.

If we think back to our time in school, most will have recollections of mixing primary-coloured paints; blue, yellow and red, creating a muddy rainbow of other colours. We might also recall applying those new colours to segments of a wheel to create something that can only be described politely as a “grubby rainbow pie.” What we were all experimenting with, was a subtractive colour model. The principle being, the more pigment you add, the darker the resulting colour becomes, as less light is reflected; hence subtractive.

All printed material, everything your home printer generates, every colour option available in the paint aisle of B&Q works the same way. The thing they have in common is that they all variously absorb and reflect light, creating the spectrum of colour we see.

No, not E numbers...

There’s another colour model we’re all intimately familiar with, we all take it for granted. It’s called an additive colour model and it underpins our TV screens, our computer displays, the screens on our mobile phones, the lighting rigs in theatres and so much more. The thing they all have in common, is that they all generate their own light in one form or another.

The model that's almost exclusively used these days is... yes, yes you've guessed it, well done; red, green and blue. That’s why when colour TVs first hit our living rooms, they frequently had little red, green and blue tags on them to indicate that they were full-colour models, rather than the dowdy old monochrome black ‘n’ whites. 

Micro-history lesson aside, if a subtractive model results in a darker colour when more pigment is added, an additive model works in reverse; the more coloured light you add, the bighter the resulting colour becomes. That’s entirely intuitive though; it makes sense. We’ve all turned on one light in a room, then a second, and noted the resulting brighter room. The slightly less intuitive part though, is the way individual colours mix to produce other colours. To demonstarte this, we put together the following interactive panel.

Pixel simulator

The top-half of the panel simulates the behaviour of standard pixels, such as the ones embedded in the screen your viewing this website through. Each simulated pixel is exactly 12-times larger than your screen’s, meaning you are able to differentiate between the red, green and blue filaments.

Roll your mouse around the bottom-half of the panel; you'll see a rectangular box that tracks your mouse pointer. This rectangle marks out the area of your screen which is simulated in the top-half of the panel.

Start by moving your mouse over the solid colour blocks in the bottom-left of the panel; when you hover over the red block for example, you’ll see the corresponding simulated pixels above, only have their red filaments lit. Likewise with the green and blue blocks. It’s when you hover over the other colours where it starts to get interesting. Hover over the yellow block, and you'll see that it's composed of red and green.

Okay, that’s interesting, but what’s your point?

Profesional artists will tell you how they are fanatical about their pigments, to the point where they blend their own. They know their medium, and it’s through that intimacy they finesse their art. The vast majority of the work we do, is digital. It’s conceived, designed, developed and finally delivered on screen. In a very real sense, our medium, is light.