A New Way to Spray Paint Color | Hacker News Reader

A New Way to Spray Paint Color

spectrum.ieee.org

34 pointssohkamyung10 comments

This seems like a good idea, but primary color mixtures tend to look less saturated and less bright than individual pigments.

That’s just how it works: pigments absorb certain colors of light and reflect others, and absorption dominates reflection. In other words, two pigments mixed together absorb more light than a single pigment, even if the visible color is the same.

Saturation and brightness are key for graffiti art, especially because colors tend to fade over time. Graffiti artists also use metallic colors like chrome.

The device claims to solve the problem of having to carry lots of paint of different colors, but practically that is not an actual problem: artists usually decide their color scheme beforehand, and choose the paint they carry based on that and an approximate volume required.

Still, being able to cover a surface with paint is more important than being able to do it with an exact color. Volume is more important than color. If you run out of one color, you improvise with the other colors you still have.

That is not possible if you always need to have all primary colors available to produce the color you need. You might end up having to carry more paint, but still end up unable to finish a piece.

All in all, it seems like a complex solution in search of a simple problem.

Wow. I was pondering this exact thing when I was thinking about the scourge of ugly graffiti tagging where I live. Sample the wall color and cover it instantly.

That is ineffective at stopping ugly graffiti, especially tagging.

There is an honor system at play: pieces over throwups over tags.

Anyone tagging on someone else’s piece is ridiculed in the community, and serious graffiti writers will start seeking and painting over their tags.

The solution is not to provide another empty canvas, the solution is to get someone famous in the circles to paint a huge mural.

I wonder if you could mostly have white spray paint and tiny cans of color. When I've seen paint mixed it's usually a surprisingly small amount of color being mixed in.

It's almost certainly possible, but when I've had cans of paint prepared (which, admittedly, was twice ever), they've always told me to get slightly more than I think I need because mixing a second batch that attempts to be the same isn't guaranteed to look the same when it dries. Still, if there's a continuous feedback mechanism like in this article, perhaps that's no longer true.

(Or perhaps it wasn't true even when the shop told me, and they were just repeating some second-hand knowledge that was last true a generation earlier; I wouldn't know).

Pretty cool. Is RGBW better than CMYK for this device? Is it because CMYK assumes a white page?

so it can't spray green?

Less than 5 seconds into the video shows it spraying a shade of green.

Yes, it looks like it doesn't spray true green but blue and yellow in pulses in a rapid pace.

Why do you think it can't do green?

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