The Color Kittens The Color Kittens The Color Kittens is a children's book by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen published as part of the Little Golden Books series in 1949. The story revolves around two kittens, "Hush" and "Brush," who attempt to create green paint through mixing their other paints. Their attempts lead to a variety of different hues—none of them green. The book's famous catch phrase is "Blue is blue, and red is red! They still need green!" Children's book author and illustrator Paul O. Zelinsky, for whom the book was a childhood favorite and inspiration, said that,
Color theory to the saturated color; e.g., next to a bright red couch, a gray wall will appear distinctly greenish. Black and white have long been known to combine "well" with almost any other colors; black decreases the apparent "saturation" or "brightness" of colors paired with it, and white shows off all hues to equal effect. When mixing colored light (additive color models), the achromatic mixture of spectrally balanced red, green and blue (RGB) is always white, not gray or black. When we mix colorants, such as the pigments in paint mixtures, a color is produced which is always darker and lower