If the primary colors were to get into a fight, which would win and why?
good question would this include the additive and subtractive models? red vs blue vs yellow vs green vs cyan vs magenta
...It's Blue.
If we hold Primary Color Thunderdome, Blue crushes everyone else. In fact, this is an important property of blue and it's one of the most convenient ways to perk a bland illustration the fuck up.
The fault is not within ourselves, but in our stars.
Humans, on average, have drastically more Long and Medium wavelength cone cells in our Retinas, meaning most of our cone cells are the kinds that see Red, Orange, Yellow and Green really well. You'd think that would make us really good at distinguishing those colors, and give Red and Yellow and edge in the primary fight, right?
Well, we ARE really good at distinguishing Red and Yellow... but there's not that much red and yellow light compared to Blue Light.
If you remember 5th grade science at all, you might remember that Light is a bunch of rays of energy traveling in waves in from space, mostly the Sun. The more energy these rays have, the more frequently the wave waves, and the farther the light travels.
Now, the sun emits a full spectrum of light, but after 93 Million miles and smacking into the atmosphere, a lot of the lower-energy red and yellow light waves have been scattered and broken up, but the blue ones are still going strong, so the mix of light the human eye actually receives is a little red, a little more yellow-green, and a SHITLOAD of Blue.
Hence, we need a TON of Long-and-Medium wavelength receptors to be able to pick up red and yellow at all!
But this also means Blue is stupidly OP.
A "Pigment" is "A Physical Chemical Compound that reflects specific wavelengths of light." and in physical media, which all utilize pigments, Blue is King. Even a smidgen of blue pigment has tons and tons more blue light hitting it to reflect and will reflect more light per pigment compound than any red or yellow pigments you've got.
FURTHERMORE, our ability to see, and distinguish different types of red and yellow light gives blue another advantage- because we CAN see red and yellow so well, we can also distinguish between many, many, MANY types of blue light- if there is ANY red or yellow light being reflected with that bluelight, we'll spot it, and our brains will say that "WELL! That blue is CLEARLY different than THIS blue!", which is probably why Blue has got so many distinctions in language- "Goluboy" vs "Siniy" in russian, The continued disputed use of "Indigo" in english, and "Blue vs Cyan" in Digital work.
I am not entirely up on the physics of digital art, but given that the color wheel in clip studio looks like this:
(Say hello to the Split Primary Color Wheel everyone!)
-I'm willing to bet the Physics-based Dominion of Blue holds true.
A cool thing about this Physics Glitch is that you can use "Electric Blue" (From about where I have the Marker placed in the above picture to the line between True Blues and "Teal") as an underpainting color, and it will peek through in an extremely subtle but attention-grabbing way that can make a dull-colored illustration much more interesting to look at.
In traditional media, that means laying down a fine layer of Electric blue media and then drawing/painting over it.
In digital, once you've done your lineart, mask off the subject of your work and put a layer of the most intensely blue-blue your eye sees under the lineart, and then color in your subject on a layer above your blue, by drawing in the color manually or leaving the color layer *just a bit* translucent so the blue peeks through in a handful of pixels. if it's a full scene, pop the blue layer between your lowest color layer and your paper layer. let it leak through, just a bit, and it'll make everything pop.
You can also use electric blue as a color-shift in your lineart, or sprinkle it in wherever you like- a little goes a long way, but I extremely recommend it.
