# Color

**Track:** Foundations — Creative Coding — the existing 50
**Framework / surface:** p5.js
**Level:** Beginner
**Prerequisites:** The Coordinate System

**In one line:** Every colour is three numbers — red, green, blue — that add like light.

## Theory, aesthetics & inspiration

On a screen, color is light, not pigment, and light adds. Every hue resolves to three numbers — red, green, blue — that combine the way overlapping spotlights do, climbing toward white rather than sinking toward black. This additive model rests on the trichromatic theory of Thomas Young and Hermann von Helmholtz: the eye carries three kinds of cone, and three channels suffice to fool it. Yet quantity is not perception. Josef Albers's "Interaction of Color" and Johannes Itten's Bauhaus teaching insist a color has no fixed identity — it shifts with its neighbors. Code makes this empirical: change one of three numbers and watch a relationship, not a swatch, transform.