As kids we were taught in art class that the primary colors were red, blue, and yellow. By mixing these primary colors, we were told, we could come up with any color of the rainbow. A bit of experimenting seemed to bear this out.
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When I was a little sprite this bugged me too, so I asked Mr. Grayson the science teacher about it. His response was to bring in a power drill with a red, green, and blue color wheel attached to the tip. When he pulled the trigger the colors on the spinning wheel merged into a sort of light gray. Nobody in class had the faintest idea what this was supposed to prove. However, it did have the effect of making Mr. Grayson, a bespectacled, slightly buck-toothed fellow, look like Flash Gordon on acid, so we considered it an afternoon well spent.
Mix the subtractive primaries together and you get black (OK, brown, but with kindergarten paints you can’t expect miracles). Color TVs make use of the additive principle, while the pigments in paints and crayons are subtractive.
Red + blue = magenta
Cyan Red Green, blue
If white light strikes yellow paint, the paint absorbs blue and reflects red and green. Then the additive principle takes over–red and green combine to make yellow.
