[braindeath]

Yeah, unfortunately color perception is one of those things that is a bit too complex for a self-discovery method. While the "symmetry" explanation is satisfying it really isn't correct at all. Color perception and color matching within art (where it was useful) and more recently as a science is something that is complicated and took many years of the best scientific minds to figure out. Sometimes you need authorities on knowledge, and stand on the shoulders of giants as it were.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080717034228/http://www.handpr...

The teachers aren't completely "wrong", they were just conveying a simplification of history of pigments (also touched on in that article). It is after all true you can mix those colors and get a wide-range of colors (including a blacker black then you would with CMY). But any pedagogy that says there is such a thing as "primary" colors that make all colors is necessarily going to be wrong, even if its CMY.