Transferability of color theory from pigment to RGB...

[Pixel_Outlaw]

Does anyone know what parts of color theory need to be adjusted between color models? Art professors today are largely oblivious to the color wheel based on light and not pigment.
 
For example, the compliment of red in the traditional pigment color wheel is green. However the compliment of red in the light based color wheel is an cyan color.
 
Do the rules of color theory fall apart for the light color model? We have all been trained in pigment color theory in art classes but most art teachers know nothing about digital art beyond picture editing.
 
When trying to show a color more vividly does one use the compliment on the pigment wheel or would it be a stronger effect to use the compliment on the light color wheel? I want to say the light color wheel since that is how RGB art is done. Of course some rules will remain intact but it seems that color theory hasn't progressed much beyond pigment color wheel notions. The light color wheel and the pigment color wheel are different. They describe two different concepts. I just wonder what the incompatibilities are...

Any thoughts?

Pigment


RGB

[hellfire]

The first model you describe is a subtractive model.
Conceptionally you start with white (paper) and subtract single rgb-components (which means you always keep two components).
Your base colours are cyan (blue+green, removes red), magenta (blue+red, removed green) and yellow (green+red, removes blue) plus black (for eficiency reasons) - so you can think of it as working with negative rgb-colours.
You can, of course, convert from cymk to rgb (but in practice it never really works since there's no 100% pure ink nor paper).
The colour-wheel is identical for both (the base-colours are just rotated by 60deg), "mixing" colours just works differently.
Traditionally artists pick colours from a palette (wheel) and adjust saturation/brightness with black & white - which is equivalent to the hsv model.