Pointillism Pointillism is analogous to the four-color CMYK printing process used by some color printers and large presses that place dots of Cyan (blue), Magenta (red), Yellow, and Key (black). Televisions and computer monitors use a similar technique to represent image colors using Red, Green, and Blue (RGB) colors. If red, blue, and green light (the additive primaries) are mixed, the result is something close to white light (see Prism (optics)). Painting is inherently subtractive, but Pointillist colors often seem brighter than typical mixed subtractive colors. This may be partly because subtractive mixing of the pigments is avoided, and partly because
Shades of magenta a single wavelength. Humans, being trichromats, can only see as far as 380 nanometers into the spectrum, i.e., as far as violet. The hue magenta is the complement of green: magenta pigments absorb green light, thus magenta and green are opposite colors. Before "printer's magenta" was invented in the 1890s for CMYK printing, and "electric magenta" was invented in the 1980s for computer displays, these two artificially engineered colors were preceded by the color displayed at right, which is the color originally called "magenta" made from coal tar dyes in the year 1859. Besides being called original magenta, magenta dye