I've been a big believer in cmyk simply because i like painting cartoons and need more vivid colours, but i'm trying to get into traditional painting lately and so i'm learning that there's nothing inherrently wrong with more "dull" colours when you're doing, say, landscape painting. I do think learning to mix cyan and magenta means you understand Why purple mixed from red and blue looks so dull so you don't get frustrated when you have to be more creative to make this purple look vibrant in a painting. So Yeah (and you can definitely get a VERY VIVID PURPLE if you actually buy a finished magenta paint btw it's very pretty) Also!! Love that you brought in other contendors for mixing paints. I love the third one! It's very earthy and natural and now i understand why my old art teachers were so in love with ochre!! (And why i could never paint realistic portraits)
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Ruvi! Yes, these more neutral tones are wonderful. One of their benefits is when most of your painting is neutral, when you do add a vivid color, there is a sharp color contrast (making the saturated color the focal point). This contrast isn’t available as a tool when every color is saturated.
Interesting video. It was a pity that you did not paint the colours in the same orientation as the digital colour wheel or just rotated the digital colour wheel to match orientation of you painted palette. This would have made it easier to get the comparisons.
Cyan's rough. I don't know anything, but I went with ultramarine (PB29) and then just bit the bullet and got phthalo green as well to fill the gap in my ability to mix. I'd be interested to hear what you ended up going with.
@@mostlychimp5715 I enjoy using pthalo blue for a cool blue. I've learned it turns more cyan with white added. I also like ultramarine blue for a warmer blue. Combining your phtalo green with purple will mix a beautiful blue that is less saturated.
@@mostlychimp5715 Cobalt Teal Blue by Daniel Smith. Another option is pthalo blue which has a green (yellow) bias, but it's more blue than cyan. Ultramarine blue and pthalo blue I find can cover you pretty well.
Oh wow!!! The use of limited palettes to create your LIGHT - it makes SO MUCH SENSE Hahaha sorry, I am self taught so far, this is amazing. Thank you so much! Looking forward to more of your videos.
This is one of the best videos I've ever seen that really clears up the controversy about primary colors. I also like the way that MuralJoe puts it- that he considers a primary color any color that you can't get by mixing that you just need to find?
The very first paints that I bought were the CYM just due to a smattering of printing knowledge. I ended up adding a bunch more just because they were cheap and I thought I needed them. After going through a couple of brands and qualities and trying watercolour I found that CYM wasn’t necessary but having a couple each of the blues, reds and yellows with a burnt umber and a white cover anything I expect to actually need for any realism. Basically a split limited palette I find out it’s called. Landscapes and nature would be most of what I paint so this is more than adequate. Which ones are the “there can only be one” doesn’t matter but is interesting to see discussed and demonstrated.
I think a lot of the issues that have come about now are that paint companies do not make good and solid magenta, yellow, and cyan. I have a theory that it stems from having to make pigments from natural materials throughout history. I have experimented with crayola color pencils and have found that sky blue is basically cyan. I've been able to mix a solid red, a solid blue, and all the solid and vibrant purples with crayola's magenta, yellow, and sky blue. I would recommend trying it out. Cyan is definitely lighter than the blue pigment you were using in here, which is why the purples didn't come out well. If you think of cyan as a primary color, lightening a blue won't help because that blue pigment theoretically already has black in it if it is darker than the "primary." Adding white means grey has been added, which we know dulls the colors down.
Primary colours with paints are tricky as it's all made with strong pigments mixed with white, so there is always desaturation, also I I've never come across a good cyan, they always seem to fall short of what's available in printer ink. You can achieve way more vibrant mixing than these examples if you pick the right vibrancy of paints. If I was to paint with primaries only, I would choose the following 6 colors: magenta, red, yellow, green, cyan and blue.
Yep, this is called a split primary palette in painting. Because of the limited properties of pigments, you need a warm and a cool of both primaries in order to mix the full range of vibrant secondaries. Ultramarine blue is warm, it mixes vibrant purple with a cool red like permanent rose (PV19) , but a desaturated green when mixed with a high chroma yellow, because ultramarine blue is essentially a blue violet. Pthalo blue is better for bright green. With split primaries plus black and white, you can mix pretty much anything.
Glad to see a little truth, first in pigment, Red = Magenta×3 + Yellow, so no Red is not a primary color in pigment. In light Red is a primary color. Note there is a huge difference between light color theory and pigment color theory. To start 6 Primary 3 Light >>> Red Green Blue 3 Pigment >>> Magenta Yellow Cyan Pigment Derived Red=Magenta×3+Yellow Green=Yellow+Cyan Blue=Cyan×3+Magenta 6 Secondary Pigment 3 Common >>> Violet=Cyan+Magenta Rose=Magenta+Red Orange=Red+Yellow >>> 3 Obscure >>> Chartreuse=Yellow+Green Aquamarine=Green+Cyan Cerulean=Cyan+Blue Other Purple = Blue+Red >>> >>> >>> >>> Rant ROY G BIV is a mistake and there are several issues. 01 Cyan is mislabeled as baby blue and Magenta gets left out most of the time 02 Indigo is not necessary, it's not even a secondary color. It's a dark dark violet that is more on the blue side. 03 Purple would make more sense than Indego, and fyi purple is not true violet. Purple = Blue + Red, Violet = Cyan + Magenta 04 Blue and Violet should have been separated correctly but instead indigo gets used 05 In light, Violet exists in two different ways, it has its own distinguishable frequency and wavelength, but it can also be created by a mixture of blue and red wavelengths (the human eye will except both versions and they are not distinguishable to us). This duality makes it a bit confusing in some situations. Note there is a huge difference between light color theory and pigment color theory. 06 Purple is a type of violet. Slightly darker with more red. Purple = Blue + Red, Violet = Cyan + Magenta 07 Indigo is a dark dark violet, closer to the blue side. 08 Violet is a wider spectrum (than the other colors) because it can be a mixture of blue and red light at different ratios. 09 Magenta has a similar issue as violet but magenta actually does not exist as a single wavelength/frequency in light. Magenta is the 1 to 1 ratio (1:1) of red and blue Light. Magenta does not exist on the rainbow but we can clearly see it's place in color theory. 10 Indigo and Purple are not necessary when considering primary and secondary colors (6 primary 6 secondary [derived]), they just fall under violet. 11 M ROY G CBV M, I distinguish 8 unique colors that we seem ti care about most, the 6 primary plus orange plus violet. 12 Aquamarine (green-cyan) is on the same level as orange and violet but in our culture we don't value it as unique. 13 If you only consider the rainbow then you would not get Magenta and the 8 would become 7 which is what you see in the rainbow ROY G CBV.
Thank you; I really enjoyed watching this, so informative...also watched your color mixing masterclass video too...looking forwardbto the next one...Oh; and please could make a video telling us about shadows, shadow colors? 🙏💚
I don't understand what is up for debate. The definition of a primary color is a color that can't be made from mixing other colors. Magenta + a little yellow makes red so red can't be primary. Cyan + a little magenta males blue so blue isn't a primary color. You can't make magenta or cyan. Case closed. The primaries are yellow, magenta, and cyan.
Do you not know that you actually can make magenta and cyan? The only one you can't really make is Yellow or not that people really know of. There are plenty of ways to make Magenta including without using blue or purple at all though it is a pain as you are siphoning blue pigment from paints such as black and add enough of white red and black it will start turning purple in color especially if you keep the red as a strong color not not getting too muted by the white Point is you can mix about any color to produce any other color, so the point of the video is yo can use just about any 3 colors as primaries for a wide array of color wheels as the wheel is like a ouroboros serpent eating its own tail from light to dark to light again Fun fact if yo add black and yellow you get a dark green kinda like the army green darker and a bit more dirty looking than a Viridian Green which mix that with Ochre Yellow with a small amount of white and you actually get a Cyan like color which mix with Magenta and guess what you get. Granted you need blue to get Viridian Green in the first place, but mixing with white, black, and regular yellow over and over while adding yellow occasionally so it is not muted and you might actually get Viridian Green due to the blue pigments building up in the mixture to a dark but clean green that you can then mix in white and ochre yellow for the cyan like color Yes a lot of stuff that is used to make black pigments actually have blue pigments in them that a lot of people just say that black is just a very very very very dark blue to the point it may as well just be black. So the idea of stealing the pigments from other colors into the target you want through repeating mixing it and white with that color is a really good idea to the point you might be able to make blue paint from repeatedy stealign the pigments from black as you can turn red into magenta or purple like that
I would call red, yellow, and blue the "psychological" primaries (or maybe just "my" psychological primaries since I can't know if other people's minds "see" color the same way my mind does). These are the colors that to my own mind don't "feel" like mixtures (plus black and white). Every other color I can imagine in my mind "feels like" some mixture of one or more of black, white, red, yellow, and blue (at least to my mind). But of course, the psychology of color tells you nothing of the physics. What we now know is that visible light is a whole continuum of different frequencies, not just three or four or five, or even a hundred. It's infinite. So technically no number of primaries will ever be "enough" in that sense -- there will always be some that you can't mix from the others. Although at some point you can get "close enough". If two frequencies are extremely close to each other but not quite the same, and the human brain cannot tell them apart, then in practice it doesn't really matter that they are technically different. I have noticed that even good CYMK printers don't always give you a great representation of some hues -- certain shades of vibrant purplish-blue, for example. So which primaries you choose really does boil down a lot to what kind of result you're after. As you say, there is no one "correct" answer.
Okay, I had to come back to primary colours for my acrylic pouring, because my colours ALWAYS turn out pastelly, if that makes sense. I need a colour wheel. Thanks for this explanation!!!
2:48 "you loose saturation when you mix two colors together" 3:41 yurmby color wheel 6:587:11 8:00 Reminds me of what my art teacher was talking about... How you should not use vibrant or pure colors because in real life they aren't that vibrant... 11:32 Gamet map 12:05 Limiting your painting to just two colors is a way you can create a certain atmosphere or visual effect in your painting
Question on the CMY color wheel... it shows blue and yellow as complementary, but don't you get grey when you mix complementary colors? Blue and yellow would make green though?
Yep, blue and yellow are opposite. Opposites mixed make mucky colours because you’re basically mixing all three primarys together. So by mixing blue and yellow, you get a mucky green. “Proper” green would come from mixing cyan and yellow.
Maybe there are 4 primary colors and people are stupid for thinking that just because we have 3 cones that make all the colors that it works the same way with paint. We need Hot pink, Yellow, Cyan, and Violet.
@@fox8748 i actually commented this on the wrong video 😅 In the video this comment was meant for someone mixed blue and magenta paint in a bucket of white paint and it made periwinkle, which is very light blue. Also cyan is not light blue, rather it is its own color.
I've been a big believer in cmyk simply because i like painting cartoons and need more vivid colours, but i'm trying to get into traditional painting lately and so i'm learning that there's nothing inherrently wrong with more "dull" colours when you're doing, say, landscape painting. I do think learning to mix cyan and magenta means you understand Why purple mixed from red and blue looks so dull so you don't get frustrated when you have to be more creative to make this purple look vibrant in a painting. So Yeah
(and you can definitely get a VERY VIVID PURPLE if you actually buy a finished magenta paint btw it's very pretty)
Also!! Love that you brought in other contendors for mixing paints. I love the third one! It's very earthy and natural and now i understand why my old art teachers were so in love with ochre!! (And why i could never paint realistic portraits)
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Ruvi! Yes, these more neutral tones are wonderful. One of their benefits is when most of your painting is neutral, when you do add a vivid color, there is a sharp color contrast (making the saturated color the focal point). This contrast isn’t available as a tool when every color is saturated.
Interesting video. It was a pity that you did not paint the colours in the same orientation as the digital colour wheel or just rotated the digital colour wheel to match orientation of you painted palette. This would have made it easier to get the comparisons.
I typically use red, yellow, phthalo blue, and magenta on my pallet. I've had a hard time knowing what color to choose for the cyan in acrylics.
Cyan's rough. I don't know anything, but I went with ultramarine (PB29) and then just bit the bullet and got phthalo green as well to fill the gap in my ability to mix. I'd be interested to hear what you ended up going with.
@@mostlychimp5715 I enjoy using pthalo blue for a cool blue. I've learned it turns more cyan with white added. I also like ultramarine blue for a warmer blue.
Combining your phtalo green with purple will mix a beautiful blue that is less saturated.
Try Cobalt Teal PG50.
@@trisbane4086 I heard PG50 varies a good bit in hue from different manufacturers, is there a brand you suggest?
@@mostlychimp5715 Cobalt Teal Blue by Daniel Smith. Another option is pthalo blue which has a green (yellow) bias, but it's more blue than cyan. Ultramarine blue and pthalo blue I find can cover you pretty well.
Oh wow!!! The use of limited palettes to create your LIGHT - it makes SO MUCH SENSE
Hahaha sorry, I am self taught so far, this is amazing. Thank you so much! Looking forward to more of your videos.
This is one of the best videos I've ever seen that really clears up the controversy about primary colors. I also like the way that MuralJoe puts it- that he considers a primary color any color that you can't get by mixing that you just need to find?
Thanks Jacob!
The very first paints that I bought were the CYM just due to a smattering of printing knowledge. I ended up adding a bunch more just because they were cheap and I thought I needed them. After going through a couple of brands and qualities and trying watercolour I found that CYM wasn’t necessary but having a couple each of the blues, reds and yellows with a burnt umber and a white cover anything I expect to actually need for any realism. Basically a split limited palette I find out it’s called. Landscapes and nature would be most of what I paint so this is more than adequate. Which ones are the “there can only be one” doesn’t matter but is interesting to see discussed and demonstrated.
I think a lot of the issues that have come about now are that paint companies do not make good and solid magenta, yellow, and cyan. I have a theory that it stems from having to make pigments from natural materials throughout history. I have experimented with crayola color pencils and have found that sky blue is basically cyan. I've been able to mix a solid red, a solid blue, and all the solid and vibrant purples with crayola's magenta, yellow, and sky blue. I would recommend trying it out. Cyan is definitely lighter than the blue pigment you were using in here, which is why the purples didn't come out well. If you think of cyan as a primary color, lightening a blue won't help because that blue pigment theoretically already has black in it if it is darker than the "primary." Adding white means grey has been added, which we know dulls the colors down.
Primary colours with paints are tricky as it's all made with strong pigments mixed with white, so there is always desaturation, also I I've never come across a good cyan, they always seem to fall short of what's available in printer ink. You can achieve way more vibrant mixing than these examples if you pick the right vibrancy of paints. If I was to paint with primaries only, I would choose the following 6 colors: magenta, red, yellow, green, cyan and blue.
I agree with this. The eight 3-bit colors (includes black and white)
Yep, this is called a split primary palette in painting. Because of the limited properties of pigments, you need a warm and a cool of both primaries in order to mix the full range of vibrant secondaries. Ultramarine blue is warm, it mixes vibrant purple with a cool red like permanent rose (PV19) , but a desaturated green when mixed with a high chroma yellow, because ultramarine blue is essentially a blue violet. Pthalo blue is better for bright green. With split primaries plus black and white, you can mix pretty much anything.
Glad to see a little truth, first in pigment, Red = Magenta×3 + Yellow, so no Red is not a primary color in pigment. In light Red is a primary color.
Note there is a huge difference between light color theory and pigment color theory.
To start
6 Primary
3 Light >>> Red Green Blue
3 Pigment >>> Magenta Yellow Cyan
Pigment Derived
Red=Magenta×3+Yellow
Green=Yellow+Cyan
Blue=Cyan×3+Magenta
6 Secondary Pigment
3 Common >>>
Violet=Cyan+Magenta
Rose=Magenta+Red
Orange=Red+Yellow
>>>
3 Obscure >>>
Chartreuse=Yellow+Green
Aquamarine=Green+Cyan
Cerulean=Cyan+Blue
Other
Purple = Blue+Red
>>> >>> >>> >>>
Rant
ROY G BIV is a mistake and there are several issues.
01 Cyan is mislabeled as baby blue and Magenta gets left out most of the time
02 Indigo is not necessary, it's not even a secondary color. It's a dark dark violet that is more on the blue side.
03 Purple would make more sense than Indego, and fyi purple is not true violet. Purple = Blue + Red, Violet = Cyan + Magenta
04 Blue and Violet should have been separated correctly but instead indigo gets used
05 In light, Violet exists in two different ways, it has its own distinguishable frequency and wavelength, but it can also be created by a mixture of blue and red wavelengths (the human eye will except both versions and they are not distinguishable to us). This duality makes it a bit confusing in some situations. Note there is a huge difference between light color theory and pigment color theory.
06 Purple is a type of violet. Slightly darker with more red. Purple = Blue + Red, Violet = Cyan + Magenta
07 Indigo is a dark dark violet, closer to the blue side.
08 Violet is a wider spectrum (than the other colors) because it can be a mixture of blue and red light at different ratios.
09 Magenta has a similar issue as violet but magenta actually does not exist as a single wavelength/frequency in light. Magenta is the 1 to 1 ratio (1:1) of red and blue Light. Magenta does not exist on the rainbow but we can clearly see it's place in color theory.
10 Indigo and Purple are not necessary when considering primary and secondary colors (6 primary 6 secondary [derived]), they just fall under violet.
11 M ROY G CBV M, I distinguish 8 unique colors that we seem ti care about most, the 6 primary plus orange plus violet.
12 Aquamarine (green-cyan) is on the same level as orange and violet but in our culture we don't value it as unique.
13 If you only consider the rainbow then you would not get Magenta and the 8 would become 7 which is what you see in the rainbow ROY G CBV.
I love your assessment. I just have one small correction. Violet is on the warmer side and purple on the cooler end.
There is a reason CYMK are the printing colours
Thank you; I really enjoyed watching this, so informative...also watched your color mixing masterclass video too...looking forwardbto the next one...Oh; and please could make a video telling us about shadows, shadow colors? 🙏💚
Glad you liked it Denise! Yes, I have some interesting things to say about shadow colors! I’ll put that subject on my to do list 😊❤️
@@KyleHeathArt That would be great, thank you in advance 🙏💚
Wow. Thank you. Great video
Thanks Mitzi!
It took me until the 3rd wheel to realize what that blob on the digital color wheel was for. To indicate what colors overlap between them.
I realize I’m late to this party, but your choose of “cyan” was too dark. Cobalt teal/turquoise creates vibrant violets with magenta.
Suggestion: Try Black+RGB+CMY+White
Wonderful! Filled with great info and ideas. Can't wait to play with some tubes of paint and color wheels now :)
I don't understand what is up for debate. The definition of a primary color is a color that can't be made from mixing other colors. Magenta + a little yellow makes red so red can't be primary. Cyan + a little magenta males blue so blue isn't a primary color. You can't make magenta or cyan. Case closed. The primaries are yellow, magenta, and cyan.
You didn't understand the explanation so
Do you not know that you actually can make magenta and cyan? The only one you can't really make is Yellow or not that people really know of. There are plenty of ways to make Magenta including without using blue or purple at all though it is a pain as you are siphoning blue pigment from paints such as black and add enough of white red and black it will start turning purple in color especially if you keep the red as a strong color not not getting too muted by the white
Point is you can mix about any color to produce any other color, so the point of the video is yo can use just about any 3 colors as primaries for a wide array of color wheels as the wheel is like a ouroboros serpent eating its own tail from light to dark to light again
Fun fact if yo add black and yellow you get a dark green kinda like the army green darker and a bit more dirty looking than a Viridian Green which mix that with Ochre Yellow with a small amount of white and you actually get a Cyan like color which mix with Magenta and guess what you get. Granted you need blue to get Viridian Green in the first place, but mixing with white, black, and regular yellow over and over while adding yellow occasionally so it is not muted and you might actually get Viridian Green due to the blue pigments building up in the mixture to a dark but clean green that you can then mix in white and ochre yellow for the cyan like color
Yes a lot of stuff that is used to make black pigments actually have blue pigments in them that a lot of people just say that black is just a very very very very dark blue to the point it may as well just be black. So the idea of stealing the pigments from other colors into the target you want through repeating mixing it and white with that color is a really good idea to the point you might be able to make blue paint from repeatedy stealign the pigments from black as you can turn red into magenta or purple like that
@@JohnnyYeTaecanUktena You can make cyanish colors, but can't mame a perect RGB cyan
@@kuutti256 you can make blue as well but can't make a perfect blue your point?
@@JohnnyYeTaecanUktenayou can make a perfect blue.. with cyan and magenta
I would call red, yellow, and blue the "psychological" primaries (or maybe just "my" psychological primaries since I can't know if other people's minds "see" color the same way my mind does). These are the colors that to my own mind don't "feel" like mixtures (plus black and white). Every other color I can imagine in my mind "feels like" some mixture of one or more of black, white, red, yellow, and blue (at least to my mind).
But of course, the psychology of color tells you nothing of the physics. What we now know is that visible light is a whole continuum of different frequencies, not just three or four or five, or even a hundred. It's infinite. So technically no number of primaries will ever be "enough" in that sense -- there will always be some that you can't mix from the others.
Although at some point you can get "close enough". If two frequencies are extremely close to each other but not quite the same, and the human brain cannot tell them apart, then in practice it doesn't really matter that they are technically different.
I have noticed that even good CYMK printers don't always give you a great representation of some hues -- certain shades of vibrant purplish-blue, for example. So which primaries you choose really does boil down a lot to what kind of result you're after. As you say, there is no one "correct" answer.
Okay, I had to come back to primary colours for my acrylic pouring, because my colours ALWAYS turn out pastelly, if that makes sense. I need a colour wheel. Thanks for this explanation!!!
Brilliant! Thank you kindly! 🩵🩶🩷
Fuchsia is closer to Magenta than Rose and Torques is not Cyan.
Just like Lime and Chartreuse are not substitutes for Yellow. Not pure.
Would like to have seen CMY with vibrant true cyan and true magenta (rather than just with blue-cyan and dark rose), but cool video.
2:48 "you loose saturation when you mix two colors together"
3:41 yurmby color wheel
6:58 7:11
8:00 Reminds me of what my art teacher was talking about... How you should not use vibrant or pure colors because in real life they aren't that vibrant...
11:32 Gamet map
12:05 Limiting your painting to just two colors is a way you can create a certain atmosphere or visual effect in your painting
Loved this... thanks.
You’re so welcome! ☺️
That intro was so sensual 😘
2Why not post your master class herein?
Question on the CMY color wheel... it shows blue and yellow as complementary, but don't you get grey when you mix complementary colors? Blue and yellow would make green though?
Yep, blue and yellow are opposite. Opposites mixed make mucky colours because you’re basically mixing all three primarys together. So by mixing blue and yellow, you get a mucky green. “Proper” green would come from mixing cyan and yellow.
You didn’t use magenta…
Maybe there are 4 primary colors and people are stupid for thinking that just because we have 3 cones that make all the colors that it works the same way with paint. We need Hot pink, Yellow, Cyan, and Violet.
How do blue and magenta make light blue?
They don't actually, magenta and cyan (sort of a light blue) when mixed makes blue. Hope this helps! :)
@@fox8748 i actually commented this on the wrong video 😅
In the video this comment was meant for someone mixed blue and magenta paint in a bucket of white paint and it made periwinkle, which is very light blue.
Also cyan is not light blue, rather it is its own color.
@Mozartminecraft Oh, my apologies! That makes a lot more sense. 😅
I dislike the zorn palette 😅
Why the obsession with primary colors?
If you must limit yourself, why not just limit yourself to the spectral colors?
It’s not about limiting; it’s about understanding.
@@cknick
I understand that I want to use all the colors in the rainbow plus black, white, gray, infrared, and ultraviolet.