You might not have noticed if you’re not a digital artist, but most painting and image apps still get color mixing wrong. As we all learned in kindergarten, blue paint and yellow paint makes green ...

How do two colors mix to make a new color? Answer: Think of light as a wave travelling from one place to another, with different colors produced by variation in the distance between peaks of the wave ...

Artists work with real paint by mixing groups of colors on a palette, making for natural blending and color combinations. That's a far cry from Photoshop-type color pickers, which let you grab ...

Editor’s Note: David Coles is the founder and head paint-maker of Langridge Artist Colours. This is an edited extract from “Chromatopia: An Illustrated History of Color,” published by Thames & Hudson.

We see colors in nature: a blue sky, a red frog, a peacock's feathers. But those colors are created by the reflection of light off atoms. To reproduce color for paints, cosmetics or dyes, we need ...