#colour mixing

[improvewithtutorials]

TikTok - Make Your Day

[k00331277]

Colour Mixing

It's weird, but I used to hate colour mixing when I was younger, but now I'm finding myself really enjoying it.

I started by identifying the main colours in the compositions I had.

I tend to like having a main colour, and then I make colours similar to that but with small differences in warmth, tone, shade and saturation. 

I really like the figuring out aspect of colour mixing. It reminds me a lot of the feeling I used to get when I used to be good at maths in primary school,  and the sense of accomplishment you get from solving a puzzle.

[austim]

🎨.🌈.🖌️

[wolfangoart]

Ultramarine Blue: Warm or Cool? A Painter’s Confession

Is ultramarine blue warm or cool? It’s a question I’m asked almost as often as, “How long did that painting take you?” The answer, of course, is always, “Long enough to start over twice.” So, here’s the short version: Ultramarine blue is a “cool” blue, but the story isn’t quite that simple. Ultramarine Blue The (Not So) Cool Truth On the colour wheel, blues can lean towards green or towards…

Ultramarine Blue: Warm or Cool? A Painter’s Confession

[flamboyant-and-powerful]

I just binge watched and finished Good Omens IM NOT OKAY!!!! feat. My room archway painted a very similar shade of yellow to Va Va Voom.

(My camera and lighting makes it look WAY too sunshine/sunflower yellow but that's okay! It's already very similar so it's fine)

If you're wondering, yes, I did do this at 3 AM impulsively. ✨

[carolinegettinginky]

When the brief is 'no black'.

As a rise to the challenge of not using black, this brings out my inner deviant tendencies.

So how to make black from other colours? How can colours be overlaid to create dark colours / black?

Time to get out red, yellow and blue to test the theory. Being attracted to, in my own practice, a limited (basically black and white!) and muted colour palette, these Interesting outcomes present a new world of using colour with subtlety to add depth and tone.

Thanks fo Joseph Albers, the exploration continues with understanding the interplay of colour.

[productive-potato]

Sun goes down🌇

[chroma-imp-draws]

Okay, let’s talk about colour theory. I’ve seen some misinformation about this going around so I am going to be petty for a bit. If you have heard even a little bit about colour theory, you know that all colours can be traced back to the so called “primary colours”. Those are colours that you cannot mix by combining other colours. There are two sets of primary colours that are referred to as such. One is what I would call “traditional” primary colours and the other is what I would call “modern” primaries.

These are the “traditional” primaries: blue, yellow and red. With them, you can mix a lot of colours, and the oranges and greens you can mix with these are usually quite vibrant. However, if you try to mix this red and blue, the purple you get is usually muddy and brown-ish and not very vibrant (I had this struggle in school a lot, I wanted to mix purples and everyone is taught “just mix blue and red” but it always turned into an ugly mess). You will find this colour combination as primaries in a lot of older books etc. as well as in general spaces, simply because these are what people usually get taught as the primary colours.

The “modern” primaries are similar but different: cyan, yellow and magenta. With these you can actually mix all other hues, including the blue and red from the “traditional” primary colours (by mixing either cyan and magenta or magenta and yellow respectively). Which is why they are also used as the primary colours in printing.

Now, these two sets of primary colours only apply to what is called “subtractive colour mixing”. Substractive colour mixing is what happens with all traditional media (and also with digital colours as long as you don’t use a layer mode like overlay or luminosity). Pigments “create” colour by absorbing light and only letting specific wavelngths filter through. As a result, if you layer more of these pigments over each other, more light will be absorbed and the colour will appear different. This is why mixing with traditional media is called substractive, the more colours you mix together, the less light gets through. Which is also why, when you mix all primaries together, you get black.

“Additive colour mixing” is the opposite. There you mix together differently coloured light (I don’t know how to phrase this in a more scientific way, I am a simple idiot). This is most easily observeable in stage lights, where when all primary colours are added together, you get white.

Here’s a graphic to explain it visually (also fun thing to notice: the secondary colours for additive colour mixing are the same as the primaries for substractive colour mixing, and vice versa)