Actually, if you nail the combination of blue and orange paint perfectly, you get a gorgeous grey. Put it a little on the orange side, it’s brown; put it a little on the blue side, a blue/grey. (It’s interesting we consider the orange side a separate colour, but not the blue side.)
Any primary/complement produces grey. You can achieve really interesting effects in a painting by blending in different greys of similar value (red/green, blue/orange, purple yellow). Each grey will be slightly different because of the composition of the paints.
Yes, it is. I wrote an article about this for the magazine Optics and Photonics News and it’s in my most recent book Sandbows and Black Lights. Bown is basically dark orange-yellow. It’s on the spectrum in that orange and yellow arre there, but the way the spectrum is preesented usually ignores the third axis, so the intensity isn’t considered. If you look at a complete three-dimensional “color solid” , you’d see brown represented.
There’s no unique mixture that creates brown – lots of combinations of pigments can make brown (in fact, brown-black seems to be the ultimate fate of random mixtures of large numbers of pigments.)
In the April 18, 2022 New Yorker’s issue I read a book review:
“Making History” is a loaf with plenty of raisins. We learn (or I learned, anyway) that Vladimir Putin’s grandfather was Lenin’s and Stalin’s cook, that Napoleon was about average in height, that Ken Burns is a descendant of the poet Robert Burns, and that when the Marxist critic György Lukács was arrested following the outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution and was asked if he was carrying a weapon, he handed over his pen.
I did not expect the bit about Putin. Now I am wondering: if his grandfather worked for Lenin and Stalin he must have lived in Moscow. Why did his father move to St. Petersburg, where he was born?
This. Unit conversions are one application, but any time you’re multiplying/dividing quantities, the units of each will end up in the result, and on many occasions will cancel out.
A common example is calculating electrical power as the product of current and voltage. Volts is shorthand for joules of energy per coulomb of charge, and amperes is shorthand for a flow of electrical charge measured in coulombs per second:
P = I * V
P = (coulombs/second) * (joules/coulomb)
The coulombs cancel out, and you’re left with power being measured in joules of energy per second, the shorthand for which is watts.
When I was in engineering school, we called this dimensional analysis. It was helpful if you were deriving properties from fundamental equations and you wanted to make sure you actually did it right. For example, if you were trying to calculate a velocity, you want to make sure your units make sense as a velocity (meters/second vs kilograms or something like that)
Brown is also usually considerably less saturated, as well. I’ve long considered brown as dark, low-saturated yellow, but since dark, low-saturated reds like rusts are brownish, orange is OK as a descriptor.
In the actual physical mixing of paints, things get muddy (pun intended). I used to sell artists paints for a living. Pigments don’t like to follow conceptual color theory. Adding a black paint to darken things rarely goes as planned. Want a bright green from blue and yellow? Try that with ultramarine blue and cadmium yellow and see what you get.
Most black pigments are closer to really, really dark blue. Many artist paint manufacturers go to great lengths to produce truly neutral blacks and darl greys for easier mixing. Don’t bother. If you want to darken a color, mix in tiny amounts of its complimentary color. Want darker red, add a drop of green.
I woke up this morning wondering what the “D” in “D-Day” stood for. You’d think that after a career in the military, I’d know the answer, which is “day”. On its surface, you’d also think that Day-Day is redundant, but days after D-Day are numbered, as in D-1, D-2, etc. Not sure why they don’t just call it D-0, but traditions die hard. There’s also “H-Hour”, which means “Hour-Hour”.
In addition to pigments which work by subtracting color, I saw an example of brown being made by additive color. By adding red and green light you expect yellow. A house in my neighborhood had a more or less 50/50 mixture of red and green shingles. From far away enough that you couldn’t see the individual shingles the roof looked brown, because each red shingle didn’t reflect much green light and vice-versa.
The use of the term is an old tradition. The first example seems to have been in American documents during WWI. Even older is “M-Day,” the day of national mobilization. It was used by at least the French in time for 1914.
I recently had some custom paint mixed at Home Depot. They sampled my “black” kitchen cabinet door and mixed up a can for me, and I found that when I applied it in thin layers, yep, it was definitely blue. You had to put it on pretty thick to get it to look black, though.
Depends what you mean by “a while.” I first made use of it about ten years ago, and I’m sure it’s been around longer than that. It’s not perfect, in part because paints that look the same under one type of lighting can look different from each other under some other type of lighting, but it’ll get you fairly close.
Just heard this today. After the breakup of the USSR and corresponding Warsaw Pact, the US fostered relationships between states’ National Guards and the militaries of the former Soviet satellites in order to build up their defense programs to a “Western” standard. This has continued over 30 years now and the forces still work very closely with each other. The California National Guard is partnered with Ukraine.