I enjoy learning new facts. While researching cartoons you often learn interesting things like the origins of the lemmings myth.
The colour collective this week was using the colour magenta which a quick google revealed was named after the 1859 battle of Magenta in the Second War of Italian Independence (previously it was called fushsine).
This lead me down the path of drawing something about the battle but given it was a pretty bloody affair it didn't seem ripe for comedy which lead me to a second fact...
Magenta isn't in the visible spectrum, it isn't there in the rainbow when we sing 'Red, Yellow, and Green and Blue...'. It is an extra-spectral colour (together with pink, beige and anything on the greyscale). There is no magenta light which can lead to clickbait titles like 'Magenta doesn't exist!' or 'Magenta isn't a colour', given given you can see it there is more nuance than that.
The colour magenta is composed in your brain using inputs from your eyes which have cone receptors for Red, Blue and Green. Magenta isn't one colour it's a mixture in our brains of Red, Blue and no Green so it really is a pigment of our imagination and only perceived psychologically.
However you can argue that all colour is perceived psychologically which explains colour blindness and animals with different perception (the Mantis Shrimp has 12 colour receptors to our 3).
All of which lead to this cartoon about camouflage.
