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How to Mix Transparent Black Oil Paint for Added Depth and Richness
Do you mix your own black oil paint, or use a black paint straight out of the tube?
It’s certainly more convenient to buy black paint in the tube, but there are some definite benefits to mixing your own—like the ability to shift the color temperature of your black paint to harmonize better with your piece.
Not to mention that if you choose transparent colors to mix your black, you’ll get an added depth to your black paint that will help it recede further on your canvas. (Transparent black can be used in glazing, too.)
So why do transparent black oil paints work better?
Opaque pigments reflect more light, so they appear lighter. Transparent colors (including black) will let more light penetrate into the paint and get dispersed, so they appear darker and richer.
Here are some tips for mixing the darkest, most transparent blacks:
Skip the Cadmiums
Cadmium colors are very opaque, so you will not get a truly transparent black if you include them your mix. Substitute Cadmium Red with Winsor & Newton Bright Red which has the same hue but is totally transparent. Alternatively, you can use Alizarin, Crimson Lake, or Magenta for your transparent red color.
NOTE: Mixing a true primary like Winsor & Newton Bright Red with Viridian will give you a good, deep black that works well with red-green harmonies.
Mixing black with primary colors
Home › Forums › Explore Media › Oil Painting › Using Blacks to darken a colour volume
- This topic has 31 replies, 21 voices, and was last updated 7 years, 8 months ago by Minerva C .
Viewing 15 posts – 1 through 15 (of 32 total)
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February 24, 2016 at 6:14 am #993838
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I was wondering about the use of black.
I do a lot of flower paintings.
For example doing a red rose or red cherries to get that nice contrast I am thinking a little black mixed into the red would help. Or just to get a colours shadows just use back to create volume. thanks
Stewart
February 24, 2016 at 9:06 am #1247275
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There is a story of two famous artists of old who were commenting on the pallet of the other. One said, I see you have black on your palette . . . I couldn’t paint with black on my palette. The other replied, I couldn’t paint without it. The thing about blacks (especially ivory black) is that it is basically a very dark blue. Make a small string using white and you’ll see the blue appear. The point is that it’s quite common for black to change hue . . . black and yellw will make green, not a darker yellow. Black and alizarin will make purple, and so on. If you find these hue shifts troublesome, you’ll have to add something to your black to move it more toward neutral. You can add a bit of burnt umber, which is basically a dark red; raw umber, basically very dark yellow; yellow ocher while will counteract the bluek. You could also try Williamsburg Italian Black Roman Earth, a black that is almost neutral to begin with.
February 24, 2016 at 9:54 am #1247286
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I use black in mixes. It is well worth testing and experimenting with how your black and colours mix and respond to each other. The heat of creative passion is not the time to discover that your planned mix does not work at all. When I use black for black I almost always add a little bit of either red or blue to it. Just enough to warm or cool it a bit and give it some life.
“Let the paint be paint” –John Marin
February 24, 2016 at 3:18 pm #1247288
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Black is useful for me. In moderation, I find it easier to balance a hue and get a direct value effect than leaving it out.
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February 24, 2016 at 3:19 pm #1247266
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It is well worth testing and experimenting with how your black and colours mix and respond to each other. The heat of creative passion is not the time to discover that your planned mix does not work at all.
An excellent idea. Don
February 24, 2016 at 4:14 pm #1247282
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Thanks everyone Maybe I am thinking more of neutralizing a colour.
You know a red rose petal gets darker and it recedes into the base of the flower.
So I was thinking of adding a little black to make this transition.
Stewart
February 24, 2016 at 4:41 pm #1247262
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From experience, as well as common sense, based upon the scientific behavior of color: Black can be used to darken any secondary color, without that color changing its hue. The secondary colors are Red, Green, and Blue. (That’s why you can darken your rose petals effectively without your Red changing its hue.) When Black is added to any of the 3 primary colors, the hue tends to change. This seems to be true of any Black paint. At times, someone will tell me that Black and Yellow create Green because the Black I have chosen has a “Blue bias”. I often tell them to select any Black of their choice, and see what happens. The answer is that they will still achieve Green by the mixture of Black and Yellow. As someone already mentioned, Magenta and Black will mix to create some of the most useful lavenders and violets you could want. This is very handy when painting flowers, and I mix Black with my primary colors routinely, specifically for the hue biases that happen.
wfmartin. My Blog “Creative Realism”.
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February 24, 2016 at 5:07 pm #1247290
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Common sense: of course black is very very useful for mixing dark colors! It’s up to you, the artist, to make sure you mix the correct dark color. When black is mixed with another color, it usually makes a color that’s darker but also has less color saturation and often a different hue. So you need to counteract that or use a different other color to mix into black if that’s not the dark color you wanted.
February 24, 2016 at 9:08 pm #1247283
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From experience, as well as common sense, based upon the scientific behavior of color: Black can be used to darken any secondary color, without that color changing its hue. The secondary colors are Red, Green, and Blue. (That’s why you can darken your rose petals effectively without your Red changing its hue.) When Black is added to any of the 3 primary colors, the hue tends to change. This seems to be true of any Black paint. At times, someone will tell me that Black and Yellow create Green because the Black I have chosen has a “Blue bias”. I often tell them to select any Black of their choice, and see what happens. The answer is that they will still achieve Green by the mixture of Black and Yellow. As someone already mentioned, Magenta and Black will mix to create some of the most useful lavenders and violets you could want. This is very handy when painting flowers, and I mix Black with my primary colors routinely, specifically for the hue biases that happen.
This is probably a dumb question, what is the difference between primary and secondary colours?
Red blue and green are secondary?
Is not red yellow and blue primary?
thanks
Stewart
February 25, 2016 at 1:17 am #1247270
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This is probably a dumb question, what is the difference between primary and secondary colours?
Red blue and green are secondary?
Is not red yellow and blue primary?
thanks
The largest gamut you can get with only 3 colours is with pigments that are closest to magenta, cyan and yellow.
Red, green and blue primaries has been taught in art schools, and is in fairly high profile books about colour, but it is incorrect.
Ron
www.RonaldFrancis.com
February 25, 2016 at 3:25 am #1247280
Anonymous
I love ivory black. I use it everywhere – flesh shadows, mids and highs, background, clothes etc. If it’s too blue, add a warm earth to make it more neutral. Even more warm earth – lovely deep shadows (I prefer my shadows opaque). Titanium white and ivory black makes a very pleasant blue. The list goes on…
February 25, 2016 at 7:41 am #1247274
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Following.
February 25, 2016 at 8:10 am #1247268
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The largest gamut you can get with only 3 colours is with pigments that are closest to magenta, cyan and yellow.
Red, green and blue primaries has been taught in art schools, and is in fairly high profile books about colour, but it is incorrect.
The largest gamut you can get in a subtractive process (which mixing pigments closely resembles) is with colors closest to magenta, cyan and yellow. The largest gamut you can get with an additive process (which is how your tv or computer screen works) is using red, green and blue, and it makes much more sense to identify these as your primaries when discussing color theory. You were probably, however, referring to “red, yellow and blue” as mentioned in the previous post. This is clearly incorrect with respect to color theory, but it does turn out to be a very simple and effective method of predicting what you’ll get when mixing any two colors of paint.
February 25, 2016 at 10:12 am #1247269
Anonymous
People should stop fighting about the primary color terminology.
Neither concept is incorrect, and both sets of “primary” colors can be used for what they are best at doing. Pure colors are the best psychological primaries and cyan and magenta are the best mixing primaries. Yellow rules as the sole universal primary color. No matter how you think about it, or use it, it is decidely a primary color. We employ the “largest gamut” primary concept for mixing the largest gamut of colors. But we use the psycological concept of primary colors for thinking about color mixing. Virtually every artist in history has done this, and every artist now reading this uses pure colors as their psychological primaries. The top color theorists in the world think in terms of the pure psychological primary colors for mixing colors, here is an example from the color theory forum from a post by Dr. David Briggs. The thread is discussing warm vs cool regarding ultramarine and Dr. B states that instead of thinking in terms of warm and cool for color and mixing, people should just simply think in terms of redder, bluer, greener, or yellower.
Now consider for yourself, why did he not say that people should think in terms of more or less cyan-ish or magenta-ish?
Because he is thinking in the simpler terms of red, yellow, blue, and green, the basic psychologically pure primary colors.
Cyan and magenta are respectively, greenish-blue and violet-red. They are simply not psychologically pure colors. They may be the strongest and most powerful mixers ever made, but when we think about using them in mixes, we think of what they contribute as their constituent psychological primaries.
Cyan contributes blue and some green, magenta contributes red and some violet.
February 25, 2016 at 4:43 pm #1247271
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The largest gamut you can get in a [I]subtractive[/I] process (which mixing pigments closely resembles) is with colors closest to magenta, cyan and yellow. The largest gamut you can get with an [I]additive[/I] process (which is how your tv or computer screen works) is using red, green and blue, and it makes much more sense to identify these as your primaries when discussing color theory. You were probably, however, referring to “red, yellow and blue” as mentioned in the previous post. This is clearly incorrect with respect to color theory, but it does turn out to be a very simple and effective method of predicting what you’ll get when mixing any two colors of paint.
Oops, yes, you’re right. I think I’m just too used to thinking in terms of RGB (additive light). I did mean to say RYB primaries is an incorrect theory. I agree with you Sid. RYGB are the psychological primaries and represent landmarks of pure colour. It’s interesting that, although yellow is a combination of red and green, we don’t say it is redish-green in a similar way that we can describe cyan and magenta as their components.
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Mixing light does result in white, but the black mixture of paint happens due to how paint works. Paint has color not because it’s emitting light, but because it’s absorbing colors other than the one that’s supposed to be the paint’s color. As such, when you mix paints, they absorb more and more of the spectrum, resulting in black.
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answered Sep 13, 2018 at 0:39
Gabriel Golfetti Gabriel Golfetti
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$begingroup$ What is not immediately obvious, is that one paint reflects one color, another reflects another, so shouldn’t a mix of paints reflect all colors, resulting in white? $endgroup$
Sep 13, 2018 at 10:25
$begingroup$ @LLlAMnYP Good point, and it’s almost what happens. If you could plot a spectrum of the reflected light, it would be almost perfectly balanced. But the thing is, so much energy is absorbed by the paint that it barely reflects enough power at all. A very dim white light is just gray (i.e. black). $endgroup$
Sep 13, 2018 at 10:33
$begingroup$ You can get both. If you are mixing paints, then what one doesn’t aborb, another one does (so they just take away incrementally from the same light until nothing is left). But if you put pixels of different colors side by side, you get halftone printing, and you see average colour, which is the same hue, but brighter because none of the dots absorbs it all. However one has to be careful about mixing and black colour: the subtractive mixing model breaks down at high concentrations – it’s no longer linear, and you usually get brownish tone. $endgroup$
Sep 13, 2018 at 13:23
$begingroup$ “Mixing light does result in white, but this happens due to how paint works.” – how does the way paint works affect mixing of light? Is there a typo there? $endgroup$
Sep 13, 2018 at 21:15
$begingroup$ @npostavs oops, right. Not really a typo, just poor sentence structure. $endgroup$
Sep 13, 2018 at 21:31
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Mixing light is additive since you are adding electromagnetic waves with different wavelengths together.
The color of materials as paint relies on a different principle. Only certain wavelengths of the impinging light get scattered back and the rest gets absorbed. For example, red paint only scatters back the red wavelengths and absorbs the others. (This also means if you light the red paint with blue light, you will not see much). Now if you mix all colors of paint, the whole (visible) spectrum of the impinging light will get absorbed. Hence, paint is subtractive. (This is also the reason why black paint gets warmer than white paint; the absorbed light is converted into heat energy).
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answered Sep 13, 2018 at 0:45
EuklidAlexandria EuklidAlexandria
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It actually has nothing to do with light itself. An easy way to demonstrate this is to get some panes of differently colored glass, and line up a light source to shine through multiple panes. You’ll notice the color gets remarkably darker the more differently-colored panes you use. Shining a light through a red pane, a green pane, and a blue pane won’t get you white; it’ll get you pretty close to black.
It’s not light vs paint; it’s light addition versus light subtraction.
When you see ‘green paint’, it’s not because the paint is adding green light. It’s because its subtracting out non-green light. Same thing with a pane of green tinted glass – it’s not adding green light, it’s subtracting out non-green.
Compare that to a computer monitor. If you’ve got a bunch of green pixels lit up, lighting up the neighboring red pixels doesn’t subtract from the amount of green light; it simply adds additional red light to the equation – which your eye then perceives as a shade of yellow.
So, what happens when you mix a bunch of colors of paint? It actually doesn’t become black – it just becomes a grayish mix matching the average brightness of the colors. Try it – mix Sky Blue, Canary Yellow, and Pink – you won’t get a color anywhere close to black; but if you mix Navy Blue, Brown, and Forrest Green, you’ll get something a lot darker. An easy way to mentally picture what you’ll see is if you imagine painting a checker-like pattern out of the colors you’re mixing, and then walk far enough away that the colors all blur together.
