> From: "Christopher Hickman" <tophu@xxxxxxx> > David Artman wrote: > >By the way, for what it's worth, it always irked me that green was put > >into Rainbow, making it "the lone secondary" of the set; I'd have put > >in clear and left all the secondaries to be in Xeno along with the > >"lone freak" cyan, which isn't even a tertiary color. Doing so would > >have also added some minor educational value, as the sets could be > >called "Primary" and "Secondary (plus the Freak)". > > Ah, but it is. Red, green, and blue are additive primary colors. > Yellow is the one that's out of place. If you want subtractive > primaries, you'd need cyan, magenta (which doesn't exist in pyramids > yet), and your maligned yellow. So now adding the white to the > additive primaries and black to the subtractive primaries, where > do you make room for the other colors? We've assumed a new magenta > color and we've left out orange and purple from existing colors. > I'd say we can assume clear doesn't exist in this exercise. ;) Leave it to a mac.com address to get this reply.... ;) I'm still stuck in the 18th century, along with Hasbro, Crayola, and the majority of toy and game manufacturers who have yet to embrace the truth of properly saturated color mixing (additive or subtractive). As such, I'm fairly heavily ingrained to use the "paint primaries" when thinking of color groupings in a loose sense (like in the context of a toy or game). Rest assured that a decade of web and print publishing has thoroughly exposed me to RGB, CMYK, HSV, and a variety of spot color numbering schemes. But from my past experience with young children, I find the subtleties of such distinctions to be hard to explain without demonstrations that are not easily reproduced in a black and white publication. Of course, Treehouse sets divided as Red, Green, Blue, Clear, and White VS. Cyan, Magenta (or, say, Purple), Yellow, Orange and Black would be more accurate for purposes of being educational... but we'd have an even greater nightmare correlating them, for the purposes of this discussion. Further, "Additive Treehouse" and "Subtractive Treehouse" doesn't have the same ring to it, to my ears, as "Primary" and "Secondary." *tongue out of cheek* If anyone's confused by any of the above, this is an nice summary site: http://www.tomjewett.com/colors/index.html Meanwhile, back at the ranch... If a rainbow is VIBGYOR, then it makes some sense to correlated them with "left-right" pairings: Violet (purple) and Indigo (blue) Blue (cyan) and Green Orange and Red Yellow and... well, the one that's left (I, too, think of Clear as "Infrared" or "Ultraviolet": if Clear is a color, I can't see it.) Hmmm... and that "Lefterly" and "Righterly" way of thinking leads us to the SAME color groupings that Additive and Subtractive sorting would get us (mostly, if one squints and accepts Purple as Magenta). Weird.... As long as we're wrapping this fun thread up, Andy, could you please tell us how you originally decided to divide the colors for the two Treehouse sets? Were you thinking "paint primaries" or "toy colors" VS. "the rest"; or was there some history behind it (Zendo box set or comparison of stock levels); or what? Thanks, all! :) David