Life is a swirl of color, but our screens break it down into zillions of dots. That’s what kids learned in Pixel-palooza as they made a picture entirely out of little colored squares. It was like zooming into a phone screen with a microscope.
To take it up a notch, kids can explore how computers make the colors for those dots. White light is made of 3 primary colors, and they are NOT red, yellow and blue. They are red, green and blue. If you doubt this, take 3 equal-strength flashlights, and put clear blue cellophane over one, green over the 2nd and red over the 3rd. If you shine all 3 at the same spot, you’ll get white light!
Even better, if you overlap just 2 flashlights’ beams:
- Red + blue makes magenta, a nice hot purply pink
- Red + green makes yellow, which is so weird
- Green and blue make cyan, a beautiful light turquoise
And BOOM, guess what: magenta, yellow and cyan are the colors of ink in your printer! Mind explosion!
Everything we grown-ups learned in nursery school about red, yellow and blue is wrong. Those are NOT the primary colors. That’s why when you mix red and blue Playdoh, you don’t get purple – you get this murky color. That’s because they’re the wrong colors to mix!
Even more mind-blowing is what happens when you mix magenta, yellow and cyan light. If you lay translucent plastic squares of these colors on top of each other:
- Magenta + yellow overlap will be red
- Yellow + cyan overlap will be green
- Magenta + cyan overlap will be blue
…we end up right back at our primary colors of light. To try these at home, check out cellophane squares on Amazon.com or art supply websites.
