Part 4. What traditional color theory gets wrong

The color theory taught in art schools and painting manuals is a set of rules built around a wheel of twelve hues, with red, yellow and blue at its corners. Most of the rules are older than the discovery of the three cones, and they carry the authority of long use. This part takes them one at a time and checks each against the measurements and mixtures of Parts 1 to 3. A few are simply wrong. Others hold, but for a different reason than the one taught, or only in a narrower sense. The aim throughout is to say which questions the rules really answer and which they only seem to.

The lessons in this part

• 4.1 What makes a paint a primary
• 4.2 Vivid colors come from broad bands
• 4.3 Three colors cannot mix all colors
• 4.4 Cyan, magenta and yellow do better than red, yellow and blue
• 4.5 Color bias fails as a concept
• 4.6 Munsell’s circle against the equal-spaced wheel
• 4.7 Visual complements are not mixing complements
• 4.8 Three meanings of warm and cool
• 4.9 The masstone is not the paint’s color
• 4.10 What survives