Why is Green the Worst Color? [Art Thoughts]

[Music] hey everyone cynics here and today on this very special episode of our thoughts i'm going to be diving deep into the world of color and exposing some of the biggest conspiracies in the art world all i ask is that you never forget who brought you this information all right without further ado i think we should just dive into it i'm gonna need some crazier hair for this because it is gonna get nuts all right now the color green is a great place to start if you've ever watched don't hug me i'm scared you're probably aware of that whole meme of green it's not a creative color most people just write this off as a harmless joke you know and they probably picked a random color but is it possible that they were actually hinting at something deeper well let's think it over for a moment what is creativity many great scholars consider creativity to be the overcoming of a limitation that's why you often hear things like limitation is the mother of creativity so if you wanted to you could also draw a correlation between the amount of limitation placed on something and the amount of creativity required to overcome that let's go back to color if we took an image of say every hue that exists and is perceivable by people you might notice that something becomes abundantly clear there are a whole lot of colors we simply classify as green just tons of them this whole area if i ask you what color this was probably green how about this one also green from the objective standpoint of limitation it suddenly seems quite clear that green is perhaps the least creative color followed by blue being the second least creative and just for bonus points in case you're wondering what the most creative color is well it's obviously orange just look at that sweet sweet limitation now if you happen to be in art school it's a great idea to go up to everyone on the first day and just ask what everyone's favorite color is this way you can know how to avoid all of the uncreative people right away jesus okay enough about creativity though let's actually talk about why we define colors the way we do i mean why is green a color i ask myself that every day let's first establish that if you grew up in most of the world you probably follow the basic structure that there are six main colors we got red orange yellow green blue and purple seems fun and harmless enough but let's actually take a look at our little spectrum of visible light here ah yes this one will do it's a little throwback to a video i made a while ago about the different value ranges inherent in every color if we look at one side of the spectrum we of course have those additive primaries red green and blue and on the other side we have the subtractive primaries of cyan magenta and yellow there we go six different colors to represent the most scientifically diverse hues something seems a little off i guess we can let it slide that magenta and purple are close enough but where is orange and also why are there two blues the truth is we've been led astray by our ancestors at most i would say orange is a mid hue while what we call blue is certainly a gross oversimplification of two wildly diverse hues now i'm sure some of you are going to be quick to point out that some societies were smart enough to actually differentiate between cyan and blue for instance in russian they are indeed considered two separate colors but let's deal with the bigger issue here why does this matter at all what am i trying to get at why do i care so much interestingly enough the vocabulary we use to define the world around us can greatly affect how we observe things and of course training our brain to be more observational is extremely important as an artist you might find that most artists are quite good at painting things that are red orange and yellow rembrandt made his whole career out of it and on the opposite side of that blues and greens tend to give us a little more trouble that's probably due to the fact that we never ingrained in our brain that there were actually separate colors going on inside these giant loose terms the truth is language has a huge effect on how our brain processes things i can't help but think that our society would just be so much more adept at art if we had a better language for describing hughes but before we can fix things let's actually take a moment to figure out why our dum-dum ancestors made such a crucial mistake first we have to think about the world we live in we have this bright blue sky this nice warm sun lots of green fields of grass all that good stuff from a scientific standpoint i guess you can say everyone was accustomed to a primary light source of warm tones and then that ambient blue sky just making all the shadows a little more blue but what happens when we apply these warm highlights and cool shadows to most colors certainly the warm tones would become more saturated in the light and less saturated in the shadow and for the blues well they might alternate a little bit between a warmer blue and a cooler uh darker blue but what about those greens well they're kind of on the outside of things and they're getting swung around wildly by all these yellows and blues into just all sorts of different hues so you have tons of hues but they all get labeled under one big blanket term of green now this is where i find it super interesting from a more anthropological standpoint because our ancestors had no idea what color was they just thought it was an innate property in every object like this object is green that's its property this of course led them to observing that all these wild hue variations going on we're still green because obviously grass is green it can't just magically change its innate color based on the lighting scenario right so this is where things historically went off the rails a bit this this lack of understanding about light and how light is actually color led to them thinking that since objects have innate properties and they must not change their their color magically um that green covers a huge spectrum whereas these colors that were mainly getting affected only minorly in saturation um didn't necessarily change color and you can define each of them in much more narrow segments okay i probably sound like a crazy person but hopefully that made sense i don't think my explanation was that great of course these days we understand color and light a whole lot better we're smart enough to understand that color doesn't really exist in a universal sense it's just kind of an anomaly of organic life forms and eyes specifically but in the universe the universe has no concept of color planets out there they don't have a color in mind now what they do have is a set of modifiers um but with a bright enough light on anything everything's just white and with a more specific light such as a strong enough red light on everything well everything's just red the point is objects don't have set hues they just have set modifiers once again i just can't help but think how insanely talented we would all be at art if this was just built into our standard lexicon at a much earlier societal age one of the hardest parts about learning to paint is just getting over that primitive idea that objects have a set hue identity you know like how people imagine skin as like a set color instead of just an interaction with the light anyway learning to paint light in a more accurate way generally requires a bit of reprogramming but let's move past all of that for now because our thoughts is more about well weird thoughts one thing that's been on my mind is is it possible to develop a higher sensitivity toward color just by changing the words we use to define colors well it might be too late for our brains especially my brain but definitely i'd be curious about future generations if we teach them to perceive colors with these different words and definitions might they become much better artists and maybe we can think about what words we should use think at the very least we can catch up with the science and start listing the basic colors as magenta blue cyan green yellow and red huh i certainly don't want to lose orange though once again more limitation leads to more creativity and also better observational skills so why don't we just start throwing in all of the mid hues we have orange obviously but i think the next most sorely needed color would probably be something to define between green and yellow and also green and cyan those are just too much real estate with no real definitive word i don't know if there is a specific accepted word for these hues but maybe this one could be mint and this one could be lime i don't know ideally we just want to avoid color names that require you to have context of another color in order to understand it such as light green or yellow green or you know dark blue things like that those are just kind of not training our brain in the right way i think yeah dividing green into three separate colors would probably be a huge step forward although it does raise the question of the other mid hues i guess purple is already basically a mid hue between magenta and blue what about between cyan and blue or red and magenta can we train our brain to that level of observation because i don't think i got it you know but then again i can't really hear tones in chinese language um so i think there's a lot of things that if we learn from an early age we can actually be far more sensitive to i mean i think orange is proof right we identify orange very easily from a young age despite it being just a just a very minor difference between red and yellow um so with that in mind i'm pretty sure children would have no big issue identifying lime and green and mint as three completely separate colors that don't need anything to do with each other the same way they look at red orange and yellow i don't know about those names though and even these names for these other ones i i guess i can't be bothered to name all of these colors they're kind of beyond my untrained eye anyway at this point alright i think it's time to start wrapping up this video so hopefully i've managed to open your eyes to some of the misguided concepts that you were born into and maybe we can finally admit that jaden smith might be on some next level knowledge when he posts things about most trees being blue because objects don't have inherent hues and from any given point when you factor in enough atmospheric perspective well most trees actually are blue it's certainly a more based opinion than what most of our silly ancestors believed alright i'm getting sidetracked again so i'm just going to wrap it up here you've all officially been color pilled so i want to thank you all so much for watching and of course the biggest hugest thank you to all of my patreon supporters for making all of this possible thank you so much see you everyone

Channel: Sinix Design

Views: 76,607

Rating: 4.8994398 out of 5

Keywords: don't hug me I'm scared, dhmis, green is not a creative color, best color, worst color, color names, spectrum, light, favorite color

Id: SqL5wN74Mss

Length: 11min 44sec (704 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 05 2021