Did you know that if you mix green and magenta you get black? Or that if you add a little black to your yellow, rather than dark yellow, you’ll come out with more of an olive Color. What Color Am I (WCAI) is a simple app for kids to experience color mixing. It helps kids recognize, voice and mix basic colors. WCAI also gives kids a chance to guess what color will result from mixing.
What Color Am I is color theory at its strangest best. An app that was originally conceived as a quick and simple way to impress my child’s playschool teacher, but that turned out to be much more wild, wonderful, complicated and interesting. Originally we thought that color mixing would be a simple formula, something like ½(r,g,b)Color1 + ½(r,g,b)Color2 = RGB ResultColor; plug in the formula and Bob’s your uncle. Then give a name to the result color by comparing it versus a Pantone, Crayola or otherwise recognized colour chart.
It seemed simple enough, until we found ourselves in opposite world. Everybody knows that yellow and blue make green right? So why were we getting beige? That’s when I was introduced to the concept of additive versus subtractive color mixing. Digital screens follow additive mixing, while real life does not. I’m not sure why this is (my guess is that screens pass light through color so all the colors in the way of that light beam add, while in the real-world light bounces off a color surface and back to your eyes so you get the color that was not absorbed). But there we have it.
The problem: how do you teach subtractive color mixing using a digital or additive medium. We asked the internet … we broke the internet. We scoured for a tool that would let us mix two CMYK colors without much luck. When we came across this physics paper, we understood why. A formulaic calculation was not simple. Doing the app would involve not just math or physics, but also color perception and judgment.
In the end, we had to check and recheck every color combination with a view to accuracy, definability of the result color, and teaching objective for the children. We decided to stick to colors whose combination would yield distinct, recognizable colors with recognizable names, thus allowing kids to guess the result, while also forming a mental framework for color theory.
Happy holidays from the Scientific Animations family.
Girish Khera, MD
You can get the app on ios store, just search for “What Color Am I”
For any kind of troubleshooting, feedback, or queries you can write us on [email protected]
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