This implies that the pencils evolved the same color receptors and optical neurons that humans did
Which by far is the least concerning part of sentient pencils with arms and legs spawning offsprings in the white void?
Shhh I’m almost there
To see a difference in saturation as less significant than a difference in hue? Yeah I guess but that doesn’t sound that unlikely for something to evolve with, especially as perceived saturation can easily be changed by a glare over the surface or something.
From a spectral perspective, there’s one that absorbs a lot of red and a bit of green (the blue one), and one that absorbs a lot of blue (the yellow one). Mixing them together, as long as particles overlap eachother and light has to travel through multiple, should result in a greenish hue. The center of the spectrum will still be in a different place from either of the parents even with more than 3 color receptors, while in the top example the center of the spectrum stays in the same space and only the ‘spread’ on the spectrum changes, even with more than 3 color receptors.
Hey, we can’t prove they didn’t
Why are the younger pencils pared-down? Do they age backwards?
oh yeah why aren’t baby pencils the larger ones
The entire comics joke is that these pencils somehow wouldn’t understand that blue + yellow = green despite presumably existing in a society where this happens regularly so I don’t think its that reasonable to try and treat the comic that seriously.
Maybe they should be tiny but unsharpened.
Fixed.
My sister looks white/east Asian, my brother in law, german with maybe a Korean twist. Thier kid? 1000% Korean with red hair and green eyes. Genetics
My wife is 1/8 native American, but has red hair and green eyes. She is able to tan instead of just burning, which is nice.
What is the punch line?
The joke comes from how colors are mixed. Red and white will always make pink but green and blue make different colors depending on if you’re adding or subtracting colors.
Additive color (RGB) is when you shine red green and blue flashlights at a wall. If all three meet, you get white light.
Subtractive color (CMY) is where you add pigments to a surface that absorb certain colors. Adding cyan, magenta, and yellow pigments results in a black surface since all light gets absorbed. (Normally it’s CMYK for printing where K is black so you can get deeper blacks)
But if you combine blue pencil and yellow pencil marks you get green (on white paper). You’re not working with light beams here. Maybe the blue pencil is colorblind?
It’s a play on how real skin color tends to work. Most of the time, (but not always,) the child tends to get a skin shade somewhere between the parents. Just like if you averaged the colors.
Using that same logic, the second pencils would have expected a yellowish-blue baby. Instead they got the technically correct, but unexpected color of green.
Honey, yellowish-blue IS GREEN 💛💚💙
The way I mentioned, yellow and blue don’t blend to make that sort of green. Comes out a lot duller than the green shown in the drawing:
Maybe it’s just because I’m on my phone but your image doesn’t have nearly enough yellow to match Mama Yellow. And your blue is brighter than Papa Blue.
By your method Baby Pink ❤️🩷🤍 would be a lot redder. Clearly the mothers add much more to the equation than you’re allowing them.
I believe you made an additive color gradient, which I’m not confident will accurately reflect a subtractive gradient of the same pairing.
Getting color values from the original comic, pencil one lets through 4% of red, 34% of green, and 90% of blue. Pencil 2’s colors let through 100% of red, 82% of green, and 12% of blue. If we overlay those on top of each other, we get a result of 4% red, 28% green, and 11% blue, which looks like this:
If we give each half the thickness, absorbtion is exponential so (the proportion of light let through)^0.5 = the proportion of light let through half the thickness. Doing this to all of the color channels before multiplying the proportions, we get this color:
Doing this for every ratio of thicknesses between the parents, we get this gradient, very similar to what @Bubs@lemmy.zip got above:
However none of this has much of any actual influence on what it would look like IRL as real life colors are made from an infinite spectrum and not 3 channels. There are ways that the absorbtion spectrum could look that could produce some wildly different and potentially way more saturated results when blending between the two.
edit: oh and also this assumes the colors are from pigments that only absorb light above a perfectly reflective white surface, with nothing that reflects light over that surface. If each pigment was completely reflective and let no light through, and the surface was just mottled between the two at a microscopic scale you’d just get a linear blend of the final colors (.5*a+.5*b), looking like this:
edit2: augh I forgot to gamma correct anything I redid the math all in a linear color space to actually be correct now
Found an explanation from Medium:
The blue pencil father suspects infidelity seeing the green baby, but green is actually the correct result of blue + yellow. He’s wrong about cheating because he doesn’t understand basic color theory.
Yeah that’s the joke
Green doesn’t look like blue or yellow
I figured he was red green colorblind.
But that would be like two black people having a blavk baby and then go: hmmmm is that right? You would assume in a pencil based society they would know that?
Maybe… that green doesn’t look like yellow or blue but is still what you get when you mix them? IDK, honestly 🤷
In the most technical way, that green is what you would get.
If you blend the colors with a gradient, you get these, which to me feels like a more natural blend:
More muddied and dull versus the technically correct color.
Yeah, I’m not sure anyone here actually knows, even that Medium article. It honestly would make perfect sense and ultimately be a mediocrely funny comic if the baby was orange and you could see the red guy in the background of the last panel. As is, without any additional dialogue or captioning, it’s too vague and open to interpretation.
See, much better! Thanks Mose
Np! Also my initial thought was to use AI, then stopped myself and said, this is a pretty trivial replace color and cut/paste. Admittedly I use LLMs occasionally, but this has me thinking, maybe I should quit 100%. Something really satisfying about being able to manually manipulate photos and knowing what tools to use. Similarly, I quit copilot a while ago and I’m really starting to get comfortable with vim. Really chasing that ability to manipulate text like it’s nothing, it’s so satisfying. Idk where I’m going with this, but PSA don’t forget how to use the amazing tools around us. LLMs are overrated.
I didn’t mean for this to get deep lol
Yes, that’s what I thought as well. At worst, I did not understand color theory as good as I thought. At best, the comic is just not that funny.
you mix yellow and blue to get green (at least elementary school usually teaches it this way)
And you mix red and white to make pink. That is not a punch line.
Admittedly pink looks a lot more like red than green does blue or yellow.
The punnet square checks out
Now do Red and Blue.
