PSY 162 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Pointillism, Additive Color, Receptive Field
Mixing Color
● Additive- when certain pairs of complementary colors are mixed- they create white light
● Subtractive -paint
○ We mix the light the paint absorbs/reflects
○ When we mix paint- molecules become close together
Optical Mixing
● In the large checkerboard pattern, your eyes are responding to the borders between red
and green
● By the time you get to the image on the right, the individual dots are smaller than your
cell’s receptive field, and so they are combined to make a brown
Fine grain dots…
● The fine grain is like that you see in magazines/textbooks
● It does create a different experience of color
○ Larger blobs of green + purple = pearly grey
○ Small blobs of green + purple = ucky dull grey /brown
So big dots and small dots make a different colors?
● Yes
● Pointillist claimed that by using additive color they obtained more brilliant color
● The ize of the dots is somewhere between the resolution of our central & peripheral
system
Because the VS fill in the space with color
● Wee see the space between the dots as filled with color
So what does this mean?
● The pointillists believed that color mixed in the eye gave a more vivid color
● Why
● When you are looking at fine grain dots- like thoe in a magazine- (fine grain dots)
○ The mixing additive- and the colored merge
○ The reflected light is the light reflected by both yellow & blue (for example) and
the perceptual result is a grey
○ The colors merge, but the reflectance is diminished
Pointillism
● Signac “these colors of green and violet are, in face, almost complementary and would, if
they had been missed as pigments, have produced a drab and dirty hue, one of those grays
that is the enemy of all painting; whereas juxtaposed, these will recreate optically a fine,
pearly gray.”
What’s the difference
● So why are these paintings so vivid while magazine images are- well- not?
● One suggestion is about the resolution in the retina
○ The scale of the dots in pointillism are somwhere in between the resolution of the
What & Where ssytem
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Additive- when certain pairs of complementary colors are mixed- they create white light. We mix the light the paint absorbs/reflects. When we mix paint- molecules become close together. In the large checkerboard pattern, your eyes are responding to the borders between red and green. By the time you get to the image on the right, the individual dots are smaller than your cell"s receptive field, and so they are combined to make a brown. The fine grain is like that you see in magazines/textbooks. It does create a different experience of color. Larger blobs of green + purple = pearly grey. Small blobs of green + purple = ucky dull grey /brown. Pointillist claimed that by using additive color they obtained more brilliant color. The ize of the dots is somewhere between the resolution of our central & peripheral system. Because the vs fill in the space with color. Wee see the space between the dots as filled with color.
