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In the 1910 edition of his treatise on the subject, Paint and Color Mixing, Seymour Arthur Jennings noted:
To remedy this, Jennings included sample cards showing 48 different colors, and described the method of mixing these and other colors, and for mixing graining grounds and testing colors. Jennings recommended that painters offering paints for commercial uses should similarly employ cards to explain color options to their customers, so the customer would not be surprised by the result.
In the 1920s, radioluminescent paint was developed by mixing small amounts of a Radioactivity isotope (radionuclide) with a radioluminescent phosphor chemical, but the radium originally used for this purpose was discovered to be harmful, leading to the use of promethium and tritium for this purpose. In the 1930s, blacklight paint was invented by brothers Joseph and Bob Switzer; Robert had severed an optic nerve due to a head injury, and was confined him to a dark room while he waited for his sight to recover. Joseph, who was a chemistry major at the University of California, Berkeley, worked with Robert to investigate fluorescent compounds. They brought a blacklight into the storeroom of their father's drugstore looking for naturally fluorescing organic compounds and mixed those compounds with shellac to develop the first black light fluorescent paints..
Many paints tend to separate when stored, the heavier components settling to the bottom, and therefore require mixing before use. A machine called a paint shaker can be used to achieve either effect by shaking the can vigorously for a few minutes. A wide variety of paint shakers are available. In the 1980s, a home-use version was sold that attached to an electric drill, using vibrations from the drill to mix the paint."Paint mixer", Popular Mechanics (April 1986), Vol. 163, No. 4, page 174.
The color of light (i.e., the spectral power distribution) reflected from illuminated surfaces coated in paint mixes, slurries of pigment particles, is not well approximated by a subtractive or additive mixing model. Color predictions that incorporate light scattering effects of pigment particles and paint layer thickness require approaches based on the Kubelka–Munk equations. Even such approaches cannot predict the color of paint mixtures precisely since small variances in particle size distribution, impurity concentrations etc. can be difficult to measure but impart perceptible effects on the way light is reflected from the paint. Artists typically rely on mixing experience and "recipes" to mix desired colors from a small initial set of primaries and do not use mathematical modelling.
There are hundreds of commercially available pigments for visual artists to use and mix (in various media such as oil, watercolor, acrylic, gouache, and pastel). A common approach is to use just a limited palette of primary pigments (often between four and eight) that can be physically mixed to any color that the artist desires in the final work. There is no specific set of pigments that are primary colors, the choice of pigments depends entirely on the artist's subjective preference of subject and style of art as well as material considerations like lightfastness and mixing heuristics. Contemporary classical realists have often advocated that a limited palette of white, red, yellow, and black pigment (often described as the "Zorn palette") is sufficient for compelling work.
A chromaticity diagram can illustrate the gamut of different choices of primaries, for example showing which colors are lost (and gained) if you use RGB for subtractive color mixing (instead of CMY).Steven Westland, "subtractive mixing – why not RGB?", October 4, 2009 http://colourware.org/2009/10/04/subtractive-mixing-why-not-rgb/
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