#art explainer

Why does it matter?

Because people on the internet are wrong and it bothers me.

But also, let’s say that you want to buy paint a do some art. You are standing there, frozen in the middle of the aisle at the local art store, staring at all of these tubes of red and magenta and cyan and blue and you don’t know what to do. You WANT to get the nice box of “all the essential colours” because it’s on sale, but it doesn’t have magenta and cyan, and all of the super famous art influencers on tiktok have filled your brain with the idea that red and blue are BAD and only cyan and magenta are the TRUTH. What do????

First off, I want to give you a solid reminder that no amount of mixing paint will make a nicer colour than one from a pure pigment. I know you wanna buy some yellow and blue (cyan?) and make all matter of greens with them. No green you mix will be as nice as a tube of green made with a green pigment. That doesn’t mean “do not mix colours”! Not at all!

It means: I’m about to tell you it’s possible to mix yellow and red to make orange and I don’t want you to point at the tube of cadmium orange and tell me that you didn’t manage to get this EXACT hue and therefore I’m lying. I know you can’t mix cadmium orange. You can mix something that looks at LOT like cadmium orange, okay? Okay.

So, with all that said. What primary colours SHOULD you get? Because the internet is screaming about Cyan-Magenta-Yellow but all the acrylics kits are Red-Yellow-Blue, so like. What’s up with that?

Yeah, what’s up with that? How *do* inks and paints behave differently?

The main difference between ink and paint is the binder. That’s the substance that creates the “base” of the product, and little teeny-tiny particles of pigments float inside and those make the colour. With ink, the binder is typically translucent and liquid. With paint, the binder is typically a sort of paste that may or may not be translucent.*

*This is a gross over-simplification for the purpose of entertainment. I am not a colour scientist.

Which means that when thinking about colour mixes, one must keep in mind that you can’t really add white in an ink. (I mean, you can, but you’ll get a cloudy liquid that is no longer translucent, AND it will mess up your texture. I know there are white inks. DO NOT mix them with regular ink.)

Let’s say that I want to make a red ink less red. I want to make it paler. The way to do that is to dilute it. Adding more liquid to red ink = fewer red pigments per drop of ink. I now have a paler, more liquidy and translucent ink, and when I spread it on white paper it looks pink-ish. (I personnally think that diluted red looks like diluted red and not pink, but ymmv)

But even after diluting my ink like that, I can still colour something “red”. I’ll need to apply that ink several times on my artwork in successive passes, and it will be a pain in the ass, but eventually I will still be able to get “red” out of that ink bottle because I didn’t change the colour, not really.

But what about paint?

Paint is different in that usually you want it to be opaque. (DISCLAIMER I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT WATERCOLOUR PAINT HERE DO NOT @ ME)

So if the red paint you’re using has a translucent binder, adding more binder is kind of eeeeh. I mean you’ll get a less “aggressively red” red, sure, but also a less opaque paint. Which isn’t great. (Again, I am not talking about watercolours)

BUT! Here’s the thing: you can add white to your paint. It’s okay. In fact, it’s encouraged! And a lot of premixed paint will already be premixed with a white binder, usually Titanium white because it makes for a nice bright base that really makes those other colours pop (and also it’s not lead). Some kits of acrylic paints might also come with a tube of white specifically labelled as “mixing white”!

So if you, as an artist who likes tubes of premixed paint and didn’t even know someone could make their own paint, wants a paler red, what you’re gonna do is add white. Which will probably make a nice pink, or at the very least a red-with-white-in-it sort of colour.

You have now successfully made your paint paler, but now there is no amount of superposed layers you can paint that will eventually result in red, because we’re juggling two pigments here, not just the one. And also this paint is opaque. (Not watercolour)

Okay but what does that have to do with primary colours?

It has everything to do with them! A “primary colour” is a colour that cannot be created from mixing other ones. Given that I cannot add white to make inks brighter, then the primary ink colours are those that are the brightest and most luminous on the colour wheel: cyan, magenta, and yellow. Blue, being darker than cyan, can be created by mixing cyan ink with a little bit of magenta ink, but cyan ink will never happen from blue no matter how much I dilute it or try to mix it with something else. Because the way to create cyan from blue would have to involve making it lighter, which I can’t meaningfully do with an ink.

But I can do it with paint! I can take some blue paint and add a bunch of white and a liiiiiiitle dab of yellow and voilà! Something that looks a lot like cyan had been produced. (Remember my earlier disclaimer that no paint mix is going to be as nice and shiny and vibrant as a pure pigment from the tube? Yeah, it applies here. I’m not saying that you can use blue and white and yellow paint to make something exactly like what comes out of the tube of cyan, but you can come pretty dang close.)

Same with magenta! No way no how am I ever going to make a decent magenta from red ink, but all I need is some red paint and some white and a soupçon of blue and I can make myself a pretty damned good magenta-ish paint mix. (Idem, straight from the tube > colour mixes, but good enough is what interests us here, not perfect match because perfect match just isn’t possible NO MATTER which primary colour wheel you use)

Oh, so what you’re saying is that the primary colours of paint is indeed Red, Yellow, and Blue?

Not really. You can also make red paint with magenta (+ yellow) paint. And blue paint out of cyan (+ red) paint.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Truth is that when it comes to acrylics and other types of paint (not watercolour I don’t know anything about that and in any case I inagine it would behave much like ink), you can conceivably mix almost every colour from other colours except yellow (and white). It takes some messing around but yeah. A cyan-magenta-yellow or a red-yellow-blue starter set is equally functional in theory.

Wait, so which do I choose?

It all depends on what you’re trying to paint and how much mixing you are mentally prepared to do. For example, in order to make a nice pale but vibrant green, you either need to start from a cyan + yellow or dick around with the blue to bring it down to a cyan-level of brightness and THEN mix it with yellow.

Similarly, if you want a deep dark forest green and you only have a cyan, you’re gonna have to darken that up with a little bit of red towards a more royal blue type thing before mixing it with yellow. Otherwise you might make the mistake of taking the acid green result of a cyan+yellow mix and say “oh hey I’m gonna make this green darker by adding some black!” and that’s the devil talking.

Orange mixed are also brighter when made with red rather than magenta, given that magenta has a blue undertone. Similarly, magenta = better purple.

To be quite honest, the cyan and magenta paints are so very bright that they tend to create colour mixes that aren’t “natural”, so that’s why most paint kits start you off with red and blue. If you start painting straight off the bat with the most aggressively bright hues in the colour wheel because some rando on Instagram got it into your head that a starter paint kit HAS TO include cyan and magenta, you’re going to end up with acid-green tree leaves and magenta-petaled flowers and wondering why your landscapes look wrong, even though you bought the bestest of most correct paints ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You could also just buy a kit that has all five colours, plus white and black (and maybe a decent brown). Reject conformity! Refuse to take a stance in the ‘Primary colours’ debate! There is no primary paint colour except yellow anyway! Wake up sheeple!!!

So that’s a couple of thousand words of colour theory infodumping just to say… what was your point again?

My point is that I was trying to google something about colour mixing with blue, red and yellow and saw that the internet was inundated with thousands of dumbass « oh my goooooood your art classes LIED to you about the primary colours!!!! Check out these kindergartners who are being gaslighted into thinking they should paint with red and blue paints!!! The colour wheel DEBUNKED!!! » videos and I got annoyed. It’s annoying. It’s inaccurate and it’s wrong and I’m mad about it. Red and blue are fine, the local art store isn’t scamming you by not including cyan in the starter paint pack, and your colour wheel « debunking » is ridiculous because you’re only mixing with red and yellow and blue without using white at all and then you tell me that red and yellow doesn’t result in magenta. Ofc it doesn’t, magenta’s a breed of pink, you absolute walnut!!