Saturday, February 7, 2009

Mixing Neutrals

At a glance, you might not recognize the difference from the colors shown in the blog on 1/21. But quite different actually. These three sets of colors, from top to bottom, were made of three sets of complementary color combinations; yellow and violet, blue and orange, red and green.
We expanded our palette, primaries, secondaries and tertiaries, to fives steps of neutral colors between two opposite sides on the color circle. Then we tinted those 5x3 colors with titanium white as you can see.
So, the key thing I've learned so far, which was different from what I'd been long believing, was mixing colors is not addition but subtraction between original colors. It leaves only common colors to reflect, or to be seen. Therefore if the all elements of the original colors are perfectly even between three ideal primaries, red, blue and yellow, the mixture results in black.
We'll be painting still life next week with all colors we created so far.

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