[dayglored]

I have followed your (plural) argument with some interest, waiting for one of you to mention an extremely important point about color as perceived by the human eye.

Namely, the profound difference between Transmitted and Reflected colors.

Transmitted color is when the primary source of the light hits the eyeball directly, without reflection off an object.

Reflected color is when we view an object that is being illuminated by a source, but we're not looking at the source's light directly.

Example:

• A green LED, or a TV/computer screen showing green. The eye perceives "green" because that is what the source is generating. This is how transmission light sources work.

• Green grass, or a green painted wall. The eye perceives "green" because the object has absorbed every wavelength except the green ones, so what you see is the light that was not absorbed by the object. That is how paint pigments and other reflective objects work.

The reason this difference is profound is that one is "additive" and the other is "subtractive". Which is why (now read carefully):

When you combine all the colors of the spectrum together, if you do it with light sources, you get WHITE. But if you combine all the colors of the spectrum together using pigments (paint), you get BLACK.

So before you two make us all any crazier, please address that in your discussion of how colors combine. It's an essential factor that appears to be missing in this thread.

[nopardons]

Sorry, I did miss your comment.

Okay, as a painter, I have painted, inside, in the daytime with only light from outside coming in and in the evening, with an overhead light fixture.

I have also done plein air painting, which is a different kind of light, because it is direct sunlight, which may or may not hit the paper and/or the landscape that I'm painting. In plein air, one can and usually does, get up close to the tree, flower, grass, whatever, to check color, textures, minute details ( botanical work is often detail happy! ), so yes, different kinds of light, different times of day/night, but I don't see the difference.

If I mix every color ( though painters usually do NOT do that to get black ) yes, it will come out sort of black, IF I omit Titanium, Buff, and/or Chinese White.

Under NO circumstances, that I work under, can I mix all colors and get white.

And...most watercolorists DO NOT use white paint. If we do, it is NOT the white watercolor; it's Dr. Ph Martin's BLEED PROOF paint. The other way we get white, is to use masking fluid, so that when that substance is removed, the sterile, white paper is exposed. But....since most white things or highlights are NOT pure white, we use a different method, entirely, which is using the MOST watered down paint to differentiate certain portions of the subject, leaving white paper areas exposed.

LOL...probably too much info above and perhaps NOT the answer you were looking for. But it's the best I can do.