Subtractive color: Theory and Practice
Aug. 9th, 2003 10:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
womzillaAbout half of the basement of our house is a large rec room, which is in turn divided into two sections, forming a lumpy and misshapen L. The back half of the room has an overhead light in the ceiling and is otherwise quite dark, even if the lights are on in the other half of the room.
The bulb burned out in the overhead, and, since replacing the bulb requires climbing up a ladder and balancing, I was tasked to do it. (Arthur used to change all the bulbs, but a mishap atop, and then underneath, a damaged and poorly made ladder just before New Year's Eve 1999 left him with several new joints in his left arm. So now I do it.It's my turn.) So that I wouldn't have to work in near-total darkness, I turned on three decorative bulbs along a shelf--one red, one green, and one blue.
As I was atop the ladder turning the screws which hold the light fixture's faceplate in place, I noticed the shadows of the screwdriver on the ceiling. There were three shadows, one from each of the three widely separated bulbs--no surprise there. However, I would not have predicted that the shadows would not be black, but would instead be visibly colored: magenta, cyan, and yellow.
It's one thing to understand color theory in the abstract. It's another thing entirely to be looking at a bright yellow shadow in a dark room.
The bulb burned out in the overhead, and, since replacing the bulb requires climbing up a ladder and balancing, I was tasked to do it. (Arthur used to change all the bulbs, but a mishap atop, and then underneath, a damaged and poorly made ladder just before New Year's Eve 1999 left him with several new joints in his left arm. So now I do it.
As I was atop the ladder turning the screws which hold the light fixture's faceplate in place, I noticed the shadows of the screwdriver on the ceiling. There were three shadows, one from each of the three widely separated bulbs--no surprise there. However, I would not have predicted that the shadows would not be black, but would instead be visibly colored: magenta, cyan, and yellow.
It's one thing to understand color theory in the abstract. It's another thing entirely to be looking at a bright yellow shadow in a dark room.
