Does color theory and color mixing ever just make you feel stupid? Have you felt like there’s a secret to understanding and working with color that just hasn’t been revealed to you yet? This tends to be true for a lot of people without extensive color experience but today, I’m going to demystify the concept of color and give you a very straightforward and rather fun way to understand and work with color that’ll show you that, all along, it wasn’t you. It was the system! By the end of this podcast, you’ll know why color has been difficult to mix and how to mix with control, with pigments or visually. It will take an immense shift in how you think about color but it’s like having the fog blown away, the clouds opening, and the sun finally shining. You’ll know the secret you suspected was always out there.
So before diving in, take a look and maybe download the visuals down below to support all of the amazing information I have for you. Even if you’re familiar with the modern color model I’ll be talking about, you may discover new things about the history and the science behind it, and leave with an elevated understanding and appreciation of what you’re working with.
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CREDITS :
Cover design by Sage; Illustration by Olga Kostenko
Color wheel graph by Sage; Background image, Two Women by the Shore, Mediterranean (1896) by Henri-Edmond Cross
Music by Playsound
Support Visuals
Click to show larger image or Right click and save image. Keep this page open as you listen to this podcast episode.
Color Models CMY Color Wheel showing cool vs warm colors. Note the placement of orange and violet and the complements of the primaries and other colors. Polymer clay mixed from CMY clay colors next to packaged colors. They are identical, showing that blue and red are not non-reducible primaries since they can be mixed from other colors. Color temperature/bias in paint in an RYB color model, with subtle (half large circles) and more obvious (small circles) examples. The same color showing gradual changes until it becomes just the mixed in color at the bottom of each column, illustrating the varying effects of tint, shade, neutral, and tone mixing. Notice how vastly different the colors are even just across the first row down. And below is a video showing the CMY color wheel you can buy on the TenthMuseArts.com website. It has a unique feature on the outside edge that shows how much of each primary is in each color. That will help you avoid mud as you learn to think CMY. Buy the wheel at https://tenthmusearts.com/ and use promo code CMY15 for 15% off your whole cart, even sale items.
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Transcript
Transcription (AI transcribed, unedited. Please excuse the copious errors.)
We’ve all been taught red, yellow and blue, and they’re not actually the real primaries of a pigment color model. This is why color has been so hard for so many. People. Hello all my. Lovely, colorful creatives out there. Thank you for joining me on the Sage Arts Podcast, sage here. In the podcast room, the furries are sleeping at my feet and sometimes snoring. So Amber is on the lounge taking over. But if you want to. Shortly come join us. We can shovel over a little bit and you can come and hang out with me while we talk about color. I can’t tell you how excited I am about this particular aspect of talking about design because for one, I think a lot of people, they don’t want to talk about color, they don’t want to talk about color theory specifically and I think. In a large part, it’s because it’s like poetry. I have this whole thing about poetry, too, because those two things, when they’re taught to us young, we are taught very specific things that we take on throughout our life unless we learn. Wise and both things can make people feel stupid. This is my theory that people avoid color theory and they avoid reading poetry because in school what we were shown and what we were taught, we didn’t get it. I mean the basics of color sounded like it was easy, right? You’re going to learn. Red, yellow, blue. And you put those together, you know red and yellow make orange and yellow and blue and make green and. And then you actually go to do it in real life and it doesn’t work out that way. Well, today we are going to demystify color. We are going to talk about why for years we’ve all been struggling with mixing nice, clean, clear colors when according to the formulas we were taught in, I don’t know. Second grade don’t work, but there is absolutely a easy way to. And mix colors and get nice clean clear colors. So if you have a material where you have to mix for color, for paints, for clays, I don’t know, stains, dyes. Whatever, or even if you don’t, this conversation is going to really help you understand why the color mixing thing has been such a monkey mess, and we’re going to talk about the history we’re going to talk a little bit about the science. So a lot of really cool, interesting background trivia kind of stuff. So even if you don’t. Actually mix color for your materials. The visuals cause our eyes visually mix. Color will be informed by this conversation as well. We’re going to probably be doing this for three months, maybe even four months. I broke it down to three months, but I’m still questioning if that’s enough time. Also, I don’t want to bore you with just color, color, color, although I don’t know can color be boring? I don’t really think so myself, but in any case, let’s see how this goes. You can send me your thoughts after you’ve listened to this one and let me know if the amount of information I gave you was maybe overwhelming or maybe was underwhelming, or if you have questions that I didn’t answer. Please do reach out to me. I can be reached through the contact page at the sagearts.com as well as through my socials on Instagram and Facebook. Whether it’s the post or direct messaging, I will get either one of those at this Age Arts podcast pages. And if you enjoy what you hear and you want to give back and help and support this work, you can find donation buttons halfway down the homepage of the sagearts.com for PayPal and buy me a coffee. I really appreciate the financial support official of those who repeatedly send me money every month, which is amazing. Just you’re just amazing. Thank you so much for keeping this going. Ohh, and also I do want to emphasize that if you. Are not getting the news. They’re already the next few months. This is going to be pretty important, I think because the newsletters going. To include visuals. For what I’m talking about, and I’m going to maybe even send those out earlier than usual because I want to make sure that you get them before you listen to the podcast, and maybe you can, like look at the visuals along with what I’m talking about. So if you haven’t got them already. In your little hands, go to Instagram. I should have them posted up there by the time you hear. This, and if you haven’t signed up for the newsletter, there is a news and notices button on the homepage of the sagearts.com and all of these links that I’m talking about. You can find them in the description section or show notes of wherever you are listening to this podcast from. So yeah, I usually don’t like to start out with the most basic and kind of boring ish. This stuff, but let’s at least start by defining some basic color terminology, so we’re all on the same page in this conversation. But yeah, today we’re going to talk about Hue. We’re going to talk about primary colors. A lot. We’ll talk about secondary colors as well. We’ll talk about shades, tints, tones, temperature, and then we’ll talk about color mixing models because there are. Actually. Two and we’ll give you reasons for using one or the other. I definitely have a. Preference. As you will hear readily, but in any case, let’s get into this. So what is all of this stuff about? Well, let’s start with hue, because this is the basics of color. Right. So Hugh is what most people first think of when they think of color and color theory. I mean, scientifically speaking, each hue is a particular point on a color spectrum on the light spectrum. And it’s this breakdown of light. Like if you a light goes through a prism, it breaks it into a rainbow. That’s the light spectrum. So a hue is any one of those. Colors that we can see and define on there, which is basically every color there is, but we break them down to kind of categories. So there’s Reds and yellows and Blues and. And and that kind of thing and within that we have primaries and what primaries are is they are colors from which no other colors could be mixed to make that color. And there are actually two different color models in the world. There is a light color. Model and there is a pigment color model. The primaries in each of these are actually different. These primaries. These non reducible colors, as they’re called, and these differences and these primaries are going to be at the core of what we’re talking about today. So it’s gonna be the fun stuff, I promise. So hold on to your hats there. Also. They’re secondary colors, which are colors mixed from 2 primaries, which also may not be what you think. They should be, and then we’ll talk about the terms shades, tints and tones and neutrals, which refer to the addition of black, white, Gray or complements to a color. So when you add black, that’s called a shade. Pretty easy to remember. You, you know, it’s dark, right? So it’s a shade when you add white, it’s a tint, which might get a little more confused because you talk about tinting things with a certain color. But just think of it as tinting something white, so everything is white, is tinted, and then if you add Gray, which is basically the inclusion of both black and white, you get a tone and tone. Sometimes are referred to as neutral because they look like they’re unsaturated. They don’t have a lot of the hue in them. But that’s not exactly what makes it neutral. Neutrals actually are mixing complementary colors, so they could be very dark, or they could be very light and they can include black or white or grey. But without that complementary color you haven’t really neutralized the hue. That is the undertone of the color. But those are kind of the terminologies. For that section that we’ll talk about, and I also wanted to talk about temperature, which is whether a color is warm or cool. And this is really like a perception thing that we have with. And then we have this term color models. Now this will actually just transition us right into the beginning of this conversation. Color models refer to the way color is mixed and communicated and like I already said, because I jumped the gun because I was excited the two major color models are the light. Color model and the pigment color model. But there are kind of two pigment color models. So we’re going to have to talk about all these. So that’s your terminology. Don’t worry if you didn’t catch all of that, the quick introduction will allow you to more readily grasp this terminology when you hear it a second or third time. So I just wanted to introduce. To you, if you had not heard these terms before, so you have a little bit of context as I go into this conversation, mind you, this conversation might end up feeling like a bit of a roller coaster. But, you know, buckle up and I think you’ll be surprised by what you learn. It is super interesting, even if it’s something that you don’t think you’ll end up using. Although I almost guarantee you you will use this information. In some fashion, you’ll probably come away with some fun trivia, not to mention, hopefully, a thrilling new position from which to work with. Color. Let’s first talk about the primaries. Let’s talk. About the real. Primaries primaries are confusing because most people have been taught a somewhat incorrect version of primaries. Plus, we have two different sets of primaries depending on whether you’re looking at the light color model or the pigment color model. Probably the first question in your mind is why are light color models and pigment color models different are bet you always thought that the primaries that you know red, yellow, and blue would be true whether you were using light or using pigment? Using anything has to do with color. Those should just be the primaries and if you mix those you can get any other. Colors in the rainbow. Right. Well, unfortunately. That is absolutely not correct. For one, the way light works is very different than the way pigment works. Mixed light is like what you see on your computer screen. Your phone screen, that kind of thing. Or in a theater setting. When they do the dramatic lighting, they’re mixing. Right. And then pigment is pretty much the color of. Any surface that. You see the color that you’re seeing is a pigment color and the reason these are so different is because when you’re using light, you’re adding colors from the light spectrum together. So you’re pulling from the rainbow and putting them together out of light. Itself in the world of light color models, the three primaries are actually red, green, and blue, so that’s known as RGB you may have. Word of that in like photo editing software, it’s the RGB set color mode that the photo editing software is always yammering about. The little things boxes that come up and little sliders for R&G&B, and they’re mixing light. They’re not mixing pigment, and this is actually what our eye does, and I think I’m going to be simplifying this a bit too much. So people who know the real details in this don’t give me a hard time. But the eyes have 3 cones, 3 different types of cones in them that perceive colour. There is a red cone, a green cone and a blue cone. The RGB again and the light that comes in the eyeballs. The cones perceive the long red wavelengths, the medium. Green wavelengths and the blue short wavelengths if I remember this correctly and they mix them to perceive all the colors that are coming into our eyes. So it makes sense that the primaries of mixing light. Are the same as what the little mechanisms in our eyes are perceiving and sending to our brain because they’re just light sensors, right? So if those mechanisms are using just red, green, and blue to send all the information about all the colors seen in the world to the brain, it makes sense that. The light primaries in the light that we actually use out the world would mix in the same way that our eyes are basically doing with those 3 wavelengths. Because this type of color mixing is additive or adding light together, it’s known as an additive color model. RGB is an additive color model. I know you’re probably wondering why you need to know this, but just hold on. It’s going to help you remember and understand some pretty important stuff about artist colors and just colors. Out in the. World. Yeah. What about these artist colors? What about pigs? So first of all, whenever I say pigment in this conversation, I’m going to be talking about the color of any surface. Like if you looked at pints out of a tube, it has a surface, right? And you’re seeing a color from it. And if you look at a ball and it’s blue, it’s you’re seeing blue on the surface of it. That’s what you’re thinking at least. But it’s actually kind of not. True, either we’ll get to that in just a second, but pigment is going to refer to color that is on an object, it’s simply going to refer to any color out in the real world, out in a solid object or not a solid object or an object tangible. Something tangible that’s not light, right. Pigment color is not light, but it’s actually still all about light, but with pigment it’s light hitting the objects, hitting the surfaces, and then only parts of the light spectrum bounces off the surfaces and into our eyes. So we only see the part of the light spectrum that’s reflected off of the surfaces. And this happens because. Different surfaces absorb different parts of the light spectrum and. What isn’t absorbed? Makes up the color. We see that limited bit of the light spectrum that bounces into our eyeballs. Because of this absorption pigment colors, yeah, they’re referred to as subtractive because colors taken away from the light spectrum available to us for our IC and our brains to interpret. And this makes pigment color the opposite of light, color, light color model is.
Right.
Additive and the pigment color model is subtractive. Now, if they’re opposite and the primaries of light are RGB, then what is the opposite set of primaries for pigs? That we were taught that pigments primaries were red, yellow and blue. But if Red, green and blue are the light primaries, then two out of the three pigment primaries we were taught about can’t be the opposite of light primaries because. Red and blue are already in the light primaries, so we need three colors that are the opposite and not included in the light. Primaries. Oh. Does that kind of throw you? We’ve all been taught red, yellow and blue, and they’re not actually the real primaries of a pigment color model. This is why colour has been so hard for so many people for so long. I know for me, I just thought I was just stupid about mixing color. I could not mix a clean green or a nice purple or a decent. Orange, with the understanding of color that I had, I just thought, well, I’m I just. Suck at this. I don’t know what I’m doing. Other people got this down. There’s something that I am completely missing and for some reason my brain can’t figure it out. I just don’t have the skills. Whatever it is. So. I know I beat myself up a lot in art school because I couldn’t mix colors the way that we were originally told, and I also didn’t have the best painting teacher. I don’t think because they never explained what I’ve since learned about the red, yellow, blue color primary model set that we were taught there actually is a way to work with it, and we’ll talk about that today. Well, but let’s first reveal the true opposites of light. Primaries and the actual primaries of pigment. Let’s look at this by thinking about a standard color wheel with red, yellow and blue being the primaries. What are the opposites? Like the opposite of red is green on that wheel, but it’s not the opposite from the light. Primaries the opposite of light models. Red is actually a color known as cyan or cyan. I’ve heard it said different ways, but cyan is the way I said it. The way everybody I know says it, it’s a bit of a bluer turquoise. Not so green as turquoise. If you’re unfamiliar with the color and then the opposite of green in the RGB is magenta, that beautiful deep pink color and the opposite of blue is not orange. It’s yellow. Yep, the true primaries of pigment. Color or cyan, magenta. Yellow, AKA CMYK. Some of you may have heard the terminology CMYK. If you dealt with printing on any level, or you have a color printer and you have separate cartridges, you’ll have cyan, magenta and yellow, and these are used in printing because they are the true pigment primaries and enable those printers. To make up any. Color they need to to print off photographs or whatever it is that you are printing. So here’s where kind of knowing the light color model helps with the pigment color model because you now have an understanding of these two sets of primaries which are opposite each other in two different color models and they will also reveal the secondaries for you and can help you shift. From an RYB color model to a C&Y color model, if you choose to do so, but it does take some adjustment and the first one is going to be about the color. Feel the opposite of red being cyan means that on a color wheel for pigment, their secondaries are actually the primaries from light. So RGB are your secondaries in a pigment color model. So Red, green and blue not green, orange and purple. For Violet, actually. In fact. Yeah. Orange and Violet don’t even come up in a primary or secondary position on a pigment color model. If you’re talking about the true actual, scientifically based color model for pigment. So once again, your primaries in a pigment based color. Cattle are cyan, magenta, yellow and your secondaries are actually red, green and blue, right? Your mind just kind of exploded. If you’ve never heard this before, I know the 1st. Time I heard I was like what? Kind of just, it still blows my mind. It’s was so ingrained for so long. And it’s weird because I’ve worked in printing and publishing for so long and yet that didn’t really for some reason and cross the barrier into my artwork. But we’re gonna do that for you. So take a breath. And if this is brand new to you. Maybe you want to stop for a moment. Get a cup of tea, get a little comforting bit of chocolate. Go hug your cat and pet your dog, and know that the world is still OK, but it is totally shifting for. You right. OK. So if you’ve gone off and gotten your tea or whatnot, I actually did. She paused and went and got some tea. Let’s talk about why this happened. Why were we taught that red, yellow and blue were primaries when scientifically, it’s not true? Well, it all started somewhere around the 17th century. There were. A number of scholars who tried to propose that there were the three primary colors for painters, that everybody should know and they start developing this out of red, yellow and blue based on what they had available in. Pigment. So if we want to blame anybody for this confusion, we can blame Mother Nature for not providing us with a source of cyan pigment or magenta pigment that artists were using or are able to use. So they had what was available and in their eyes from the pigments that they had available. Red was a primary. Yellow is a primary and blue was a primary. And you could mix almost any other color. From them. But only sort of later on in the 20th century, chemistry would provide those pigments needed to properly create a cyan and a magenta, and a true yellow actually as well. And these more precise primaries were then readily adopted by the printing industry, but for some reason it was too late, at least for Western societies. Language and association with color to have it translate into art. Materials the problem was no one had made artist colors, especially in paint pastels, etcetera. In these colors in the C&Y colors, so it wasn’t being used, it wasn’t being taught, it wasn’t available. All those things made it so that even here, even now, even in schools today, RYB is being taught. Red, yellow and blue as primaries. And students everywhere are trying to mix greens from yellow and blue and just being confused. Unless they were taught about color temperatures and we’ll get to that in just a second. So I tried to find out when CMYK started making its way into artist materials, paint in particular. That always seems to lead the way with this kind of thing. So I don’t know exactly when that happened, what it wasn’t that long ago that it became a more regular thing that you would find these colors in artist materials. I know when I was in art school, these were not available in anything that I had. And of course, we weren’t taught about CNN. Why? But we are modern people, so if you’re open to switching to cyan, magenta, and yellow, you’ll likely find your color mixing is going to be brighter and more saturated and cleaner. As I like to think of it then through the use of RYB now caveat, not all artist materials have a cyan, magenta. From pure yellow available. But if you do, I do want you to consider it. It is a complete mind shift. It will take a little while to get used to. The idea, but the first thing you probably want to do if you’re up for it, is find yourself a CMYK color wheel. And even for the term CMYK. And I’m not saying the K because it’s not part of the color model K actually means black. It’s the key. Color imprinting is called key that black is used to actually make shades and define things in printing. But in any case, get a CNY color wheel. I do sell them and you can find them at 10th news. Arts.com. I don’t have a ton left, but you can jump in there and maybe I’ll get a discount for you in the newsletter. So if you got the newsletter, take a peek for that discount so you can grab that color wheel if you’d like. You can also try to print them directly off of something that you find online. Unfortunately, most of your printers will not. Take the image that you have on your screen and translate it directly and correctly to what you print out on your computer, and you may have known that like when you’re doing photographs and stuff, it doesn’t always translate because guess what, the images and the colors that are on your screen are light and they mix differently and they show differently. And then, of course, what you have coming out of your printer is pigment and it is a different color set and it works differently. In any case, you won’t have a very exact model if you print it. And I mean visually because they won’t look quite right. The cyan and the magenta will not be as bright as they look on your screen. But you will have the correct type of color wheel with the correctly labeled colors and distribution of those colors around the wheel. Get what you can and start working with that. If you are up for it. Because I’m not here today to convince you to use CMYK. I do however think it would be a shame for you to not least. Try to do some color mixing. If you have to do color mixing for your work with CMI if it’s available, and this includes even mosaics or collage or photography, thinking about cyan, magenta and yellow as your primary colors and thinking about the color wheel with those on them. Because the contrasting colors the complements are not going to be the same on a C&Y color wheel is on an RGB color wheel. They’re closed. They’re very close, but they’re not the same. And it’s gonna be really interesting if you start thinking in terms of complements and opposites and analogous colors using a CMYK wheel. OK, up to this point, you’re kind of taking my word for it. As to why CMYK works and YRYB does not, so I’m gonna explain to you why RYB does not work as a color mixing model. And to do that, I need to talk about mud and not the kind that I have tons of outside because it’s been raining. But a lot of times you mix colors and you’re like they just don’t look very bright. They just look blah and that’s because basically you’re making a version of mud when you mix all your primaries together, your cyan, magenta and yellow, you end up with mud, a kind of. Brown or Gray or brown Gray color because all of the colors are together, everything’s contrasting everything else. You get mud when you use RYB. Red is not a primary, red is a combination. And this is gonna blow your mind. Red is a combination of yellow and magenta, and if you don’t believe me, look at the visuals that I sent you or that you found on Instagram or Facebook. And there’s an example done with Paul Mcclay mixing magenta and yellow to get red and mixing. Cyan and magenta to get blue. Now remember when we defined what primaries are? They’re non reducible colors, they can’t be mixed from anything else. So how is it possible to mix a red if it was a primary color? Well, it’s not so that’s. Part of your proof. I know that’s. Gonna just boggle your mind. It still boggles my mind, but it works and the proof is in the doing of it. So go out there and buy yourself some cyan, magenta and yellow and whatever medium you either work in or a medium that you feel comfortable working in and try it. It’s going to be amazing. It’s going to be like a magic show to you to see this. Happened. So here’s the thing. Since magenta and yellow can make. Red if you mix red with blue to try to get a nice bright purple, it’s not going to happen because red has yellow in it and has magenta in it, and now you’re adding blue which has cyan in it. So you have all three primaries. When you’re mixing that red and that blue together. All three of the primaries are in. There, all three of the true primaries are included, red bean, yellow and magenta, and blue beam, magenta and cyan, so they’re all in there, and that’s why they’re muddy, cause all three of your primaries are together, and that’s what you want to avoid. If you want bright colors. So if you’re trying to make green and you mix yellow and blue. Same thing, blue is cyan and vincenta, so you got yellow, cyan and magenta all in the same mix, and so your green doesn’t look very. That’s why color mixing has been so frustrating for so many of us. Now. If this is a bit too mind-blowing and you’re not ready to move into a whole nother color system, cause some of us aren’t, it’s fine. You can use the idea of color temperature to help you mix correctly, but understanding that the three true primaries are in your red and are in your blue that you are trying to mix with will help you in choosing the right temperature color. Order to mix with. If you have red on your palette, I’m gonna just use paint because it’s the easiest one almost. I have probably dealt with paint at some point. If you have red on your palette, you can have a warm red or a cool red. Now what the heck does that mean? Warm means that you lean into the warm side. Of the. Color wheel and the warm side of the color wheel include all the things that feel like fire and feel warm, so everything from yellow, green through yellow, orange, red, and magenta. Those are all considered warm colors because our visceral response to those colors is that they appear warm. They represent and are associated with things that feel warm, fire and sunlight. The flush of our skin when they turns red, all that kind of stuff and then cool colors we associate with things that are cool. So that goes green and cyan and blue and via. That those colors are the colors of water and lush foliage, and even like ice and night time when things are cooler when the sun’s not out, those colors appear cooler blue or purple, or that kind of thing. Your cool colors and your warm colors. We have a visceral response to them, and it also defines where things are leaning. On a color wheel, so if you choose a red which is kind of smack in the middle of the warm section of the color wheel, so you’re like, how could it be a cool red? Well, every red in the available. Gold pigments that you have in any artist material, you’ll find Reds and Blues and greens and all these that lean one way or the other that they lean on the color wheel towards the warmer colors or towards the cooler colors. So you can have Reds that lean more towards yellow or maybe a little orange ear and then you have Reds that leaning towards magenta and maybe have a little bit of a Violet. Tinge to it or magenta tinge to it. Actually, when you are laying out. Colors for paint or for clay or for anything else. You can choose to work with RYB, but choose a warm and cool version of each of your primaries, including yellow, which, even though it’s a primary in both of these models, both the CMYK and the RYB color models. It’s very hard, especially in the payment world. To slice out a very true version of those colors from the basically the light spectrum. So you have yellows that are warmer, which means they lean just a little bit towards orange and you have yellows that are cooler that lean it just a little bit towards greens or. Blues or cyanos, right? See, I can’t even say it when I talk about the way they lean. I don’t even use magenta and cyan as often as I probably should, but it’s just this is how we were raised, so that’s OK. If it doesn’t really sink in for you. But knowing that if you want to mix the purple, you can choose a red that leans towards Violet and you can choose a blue that leans towards Violet. You’re going to have less of that third primary that you don’t want. So in red, if you’re trying to make a purple, you don’t want. Yellow. OK, right. I mean, it’s the opposite in the traditional color wheel. So if you added yellow to purple, you get mud too, right? So pick a red that’s on the cool side. It leans away from the yellow. So you can just be mixing the red with more the magenta and the cyan and it more the blue. And then you won’t be mixing that third primary and at least not very much. And so, excluding as much of that third primary as possible will give you a cleaner mix will give you a cleaner color. Does this make sense? I feel like this is so much information that can be new to you and so mind boggling and it’s I’m giving it to you in an auditory fashion, which is why I’m going to do so many visual aids for you. If you want the technical term for what we were just talking about, it’s known as color bias. So that’s a characteristic seen in a. Hue, that tells us what the other hue is that it leans towards. So particularly yellow if it’s not true, yellow color bias characteristic identifies that it has a touch of cyan or it has a touch of magenta and leans one way or the other. So touch of Magenta would make it lean towards warm, and a touch of cyan or green is what we probably would see lean towards cool. So yeah, if you want to stick with. RYB, or if you don’t want to stick with RGB and you want to do CMYK, the same rule applies. You want not to have cyan, magenta and yellow mixed together. Unless you want neutrals, you want mud, you want to go that direction. But basically knowing this means you’re going to have control over how muddy or how bright and saturated your colors will be, because now you understand why the colors do get muddy when they do, and how to avoid that. Now that can transition us into the one last thing I just wanted to bring up, and this is going to be pretty short. The definition and role of shades, tints, tones and neutrals. Because when you’re mixing color, those also play into the end result, so you can’t just mix your yellow and your cyan together to get just any green. Very often we are looking for a grass green or a lime green or a mint green, and in order to get those colors you have to. Add white and or black and or a complement maybe all of. And that’s when you tint shade tone or neutralize your color. So a grass green or a leaf green is usually a little bit darker, so you’re probably throwing in a little bit of black in there, just a touch to get it to lean into those darker shades. And if you’re looking to make a mint color that leans towards pastel, so you add a little white. To take that down and tint it. Into your mint color, and if you add both white and black because white and black together make Gray right. So if you add Gray then you tone down your color and you get like a smoky green or you can add the complement to that green which is magenta. I have to stop even think about it for a second. What’s the off? But yeah, you add a little magenta and you get like a sage green. Actually, how much you put in there and it neutralizes the color because you’re actually starting to get it to lean towards mud. Right? So because if you put green and magenta together, green has yellow and cyan and then magentas magenta. Now you have all three primaries. So we’ll start going muddy, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. If you want a nice neutral color, Yep. Sage is a neutral color, unlike the person. Or if you say it’s a little money, then I can’t say that’s not unlike the person. Referring to myself and Speaking of mud, you can mix the black and white or Gray and the complement and really neutralize those colors, cause the complement neutralizes the hue and the tint and the shade, the black and the white tone down the saturation of the color. Just think of black white. And the complement of whatever you’re working with, or really any other color that has the third primary in it, you put those together to make all kinds of color. So those are really what your palette is. Your palettes are your primary, so you can so in paint for instance, you can work with just cyan, magenta, yellow, black and white. Right. Because you can make any color you need to out of the CMYK and then the black and white can shade tint or tone and then you can go neutral by adding the grey and some other color. That will make all three of the primaries included in your color to make neutrals. So if you take what you’ve learned and you either get a cyan. Magenta and yellow as primary colors in your artist material along with. Black and white, you can make any color in the rainbow, right? Any color that you see out in the world can be emulated through the mixing of these five items. Now if you want to stay with RYBI would suggest that you get a palette and if you want the most. Limited palette possible. Two Yellows, 2 Reds, 2 Blues and then. And white, you know, so you’re going to do a warm and a cool red and red warm and cool yellow warm and cool blue and a black and white. So what does that? That’s eight colors. So you can work with five or eight colors in your artist material to get pretty much any color that you want. And now understanding why your colors were always getting kind of mucky and muddy and not what you wanted them to be. I bet you you can go out there and mix. Successfully just understanding that the true primaries are actually cyan, magenta, and yellow, and thinking about whether they’re included in the mix that you’re making, you can do all the mixing you want. Just having this information with the right materials, the right basic mat. Cereals. Now there is one other thing I should mention about colors in your material, because we’re dealing with pigment, there are different strengths of pigment, and we’re talking about actual pigment, not the pigment model thing. Different colors have different strengths in your mix, so if you mix yellow and magenta. As you’re trying to get a red, there’s a good chance you’re going to have to put a lot more yellow in your mix than you will put magenta, because in most materials yellow is not a very strongly pigment. Color the pigments and other colors will overwhelm the kind of delicate level of pigment in a yellow. In my experience, most pigments, the darker the pigment it is, the more dominant it will be in a mix, so there’s no exact mixture like you can’t say do half yellow and half magenta because you’ll get a red, you’ll get. A rosy red is what you’ll get most likely. Mixing is not usually very exact in artist materials, so you’ll have to experiment and practice to figure out how your particular artist materials. Work, but now you can go out and mix with a lot more certainty and a lot more control. So I hope this is giving you some hope. If you have struggled with this before and I really, really, really hope you go out and find some cyan and magenta and true yellow and start mixing. Based on the CNY color wheel and see what you get because it’s just like amazing. It’s just really amazing what you can do that you didn’t think you could do before. So that is the big color mix up that I wanted to start off this color journey with. The main thing was giving you the opportunity to consider cyan, magenta and yellow as primaries. And if you have not adjusted to that color model, that maybe you could go out and try it. And if you have adjusted to it, but you never really understood why this worked better than. Red, yellow and blue. Now you understand. And I think it’ll give you greater confidence as you move forward in your mixing because you’ll know why. You’ll understand why you don’t want all three primaries in your color. If you want it to be really bright and saturated. Hopefully this is helpful for those of you who don’t do color mixing because you do photography or mosaics or whatnot. Keep in mind that the eye mixes colors as well, so like think of pointillism or looking at an Impressionist painting. Look at Monet. Oh my gosh, you go off to a Monet really close and you would not believe the colors that are actually. In there making the. Color that you see when you step. That and understanding that color mixing that the brain does, which is very similar to the color mixing that we do on our paint palettes or with our clay or color pencils or pastels or markers, if you apply any of these things in dots or marks that they’re set next to each other, even if they’re different colors that I will mix as if you were mixing them together. To make the color itself and that’s why if you’re working in mosaics or leading embroidery or seed beads or anything, we have small bits of color. When you’re far enough away from that item, those colors will be mixed in the brain, as if those colors were mixed together like. Segments. So if you work in any materials or forms for which when people step back, the colors could be mixed by the brain visually, then you would want to know this information as well. And then if you are working with photography at all, whether you’re a photographer or you’re just taking pictures of your art and you’re trying to adjust things in your photo editing software, you’ll now understand. Number one, what those sliders are they’re RGB stuff and know that their primaries are red, green and blue, so that you understand the primaries that you used to know. And even the primaries that you just learned about the RYB and the CMY. Don’t actually apply to doing adjustments on your screen now. I’m not going to get into the ways to adjust for light color cause there’s a whole other thing and I don’t know how many of you actually work with it, but now that you know that is a thing that you can’t think in terms of the traditional RYB primaries that you were taught in grade school, and you can’t think in terms of pigment. When you make adjustments on a computer screen, you know that you can go out and learn about it because it’s going to be a very different thing than what you have probably been thinking up to this time. So I’m going to leave that there and hopefully your mind isn’t mush and hopefully you’ve gotten hold of the visuals so you can take a look and see what I’m talking about and then just spend this month considering that like every time you sit down to mix the color or you look at a color, you put two colors next to each other, you know, just think are these primary secondaries. Where do these end up on the color wheel? Get that CMYK wheel, either print it out or you can order one from my website or. And find them elsewhere. But if you do want to buy it on the website at 10th musearts.com, that’s 10th spelled dot TENTHMUSE arts.com. You can use code CMYK 15 to get 15% off your shopping cart you want to buy magazines or books, or the CMYK wheels, or there’s Gray skills. I think it’s still have grayscales. Available there. As well go into tenthresorts.com. You can buy this for yourself with a 15% discount. CNY 15 is the promo code you need and that actually also helps fund the podcast cause everything I make through the store actually just goes into this project so. Let that all sink. In and go play with color. It’ll be eye opening if you haven’t. That’s with this whole concept of seeing why and then we will get back to some color at the beginning of the next couple. In the meantime, please do let me know what you thought of this particular episode, because this is this is hard. This is hard to figure out. What I could actually relate to you in a podcast, but if I do nothing else but get you thinking about color and thinking about how you use color even if you don’t want to change your color model, I think I’ve done my job and I think. This will be an enlightening and new little excursion that you can go off on. So do write me and tell me what you think about this episode and what you want to hear more of about color or less of about. Color or anything that I maybe missed that you want to have me share with everybody or if you have stories about the first time you ran to see and why or what you’re thinking now about the change in color models at the sagearts.com go to the contact page to write me there or through social media on the Sage Arts podcast pages on Facebook or Instagram through messages or any of the? Post on there and you can donate on that home page halfway down to buy me a coffee or PayPal buttons. You can do a monthly donation or one time donation. That would be fantastic. Help support give back. Love it. And to make it easy for you, all these links are available in the description section or show notes section of the podcast player through which you are listening to this podcast. And if you haven’t done already, please do hit the follow button on your podcast player, cause you may have noticed if you’ve been following her for a while that they haven’t been every week because. Honestly, having a puppy is like having a baby, plus other things that are going on with me that I’m not gonna bore you with. And then this color stuff is a lot more intensive right now for me to put together for you, but yet that using notices button on the homepage of sagearts.com and you will know when the. Amount or hit the follow button on your podcast player and you’ll get notices for when the new episodes are out. Follow and get the newsletter and what else did I say? I guess I didn’t say, just go out and feed that Muse and go enjoy the colors of spring or the colors of fall. If you’re down South. As always, be true to your weirdness and then join me again. Next time on the Sage Arts podcast.
I was so exited to stumble across your podcast dealing with color theory, especially since you embrace the CMY color model! I have recently started mixing my own colors of polymer clay and found one really good YouTube that explained how to match a particular color and that helped me a lot but I was still stymied by having some colors be too bright or not what I was after. I still haven’t been able to create an acceptable ochre color. 😡 I can’t wait for the other podcasts in the series and in the meantime, I have started listening to your others from Day 1!
Looking forward to more!
Thank you so much for your kind words. I’m glad you found the podcast too! 🙂 Yes, color can be such a mystery but the CMY model helps so much. I’m so glad the podcast is helping!