Triadic colors can seem pretty straightforward on the surface, but we’re going to take a little bit of a deeper dive to get a better understanding of what triadic colors are and why they are important.

What are Triadic Colors?

Triadic colors are colors that relate to each other on a triangle on a color wheel. So when we’re looking at the color wheel, if I were to draw a triangle between the red the yellow and the blue, the red yellow and blue would be considered triadic colors.

So red, yellow, and blue they make a triangle on the color wheel. Great! We have triadic colors!

But the triangle doesn’t always have to point towards yellow. So for example, if we made a triangle going between the orange, the green, and the purple, these are also triadic colors. They make a triangle on the color wheel, and these colors relate to each other in a triangular way. Therefore they are triadic colors.

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Advanced Triadic Colors

Now this is a very simple approach to what a triadic color is, but there are more complicated ways to think about triadic colors.

Let’s go to a color wheel that has a few more colors on it. Before, we went to red, yellow, and blue. But what if we went from a purpley-red to an orange-yellow to a greeny-blue? These would also be triadic colors.

You can basically rotate this triangle any way you want on the color wheel to find triadic colors. Triadic colors can be nearly any three colors. The term “triadic” simply represents the relationship of those colors on the color wheel.

Some people play with this idea of triadic colors by adjusting it a bit. For example, what if your triangle was not a perfect triangle? You can have triangles that are not equilateral. So you can have a skinny triangle and some would say it is still a triadic color.

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The Fletcher Palette

For those of you color geeks out there, the Fletcher palette uses this concept of unequal triangles to find variable triadic color harmonies.

Fletcher came up with a system where he wanted to make colors match music harmonies. He was really into using triadic colors and he tried to match the colors to the structures of musical chords. So, he divided colors into major and minor keys using triangles and other shapes.

If you really want a thorough understanding of his system, I recommend reading the Fletcher Palette book. For the purposes of this article, I just wanted to give you an example of a way that triadic colors can be taken into a more sophisticated realm.

So to review, we covered what a triadic colors essentially are, and a few ways they can be used by artists to determine color schemes for their work. If you enjoyed this article, make sure to join our wildly popular art newsletter for art tidbits in your inbox every week.

Watch our video on Triadic Colors below.

If you have ever wondered how to mix brown paint, this article will teach you everything you need to know to get it right.

What exactly is brown?

When we think of colors, we tend to think about red, orange, yellow, green, blue or purple. These are the colors we are often taught about in school.

But we all have likely seen colors in the real world that were not exact matches to what we see on a color wheel. Like the color brown.

But what colors do I need to mix together to make brown paint? And why specifically isn’t brown on the color wheel?

By solving these two mysteries, you will unlock the secret of how to mix brown paint.

Want more great color theory information? Read this article on colors opposites on the color wheel.

There are three elements to every color.

If you truly want to understand colors and how to mix them, you need to learn how to identify the three major elements of color.

Every color that you observe has three elements: value, chroma, and hue.

Value is how light or dark a color is. Lemon yellow is a very light color, for example, and blue jeans are a darker color.

Chroma is how intense the color is. A lemon is very, very yellow. Mustard is also yellow, but not as intense of a yellow as the lemon.

The lemon is more chromatic than the mustard. Mustard is more neutral than the lemon.

Hue is where the color is located on the color wheel. The hue can be red, orange, yellow, green, blue, or purple. The hue of a lemon is yellow. The hue of mustard is also yellow. The hue of blue jeans is blue.

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Why isn’t brown on the color wheel?

Brown isn’t on the color wheel because brown is actually orange.

What?

You heard me.

Brown is orange.

Now before you panic, let me explain why brown is orange and how to mix brown paint with this knowledge.

The hue of brown is actually orange. This means if you had to assign the color brown to be red, orange, yellow, green, blue or purple, it fits most closely with orange than with any of the other colors.

Some of you might be thinking, “It doesn’t look orange!”

And that is because of the chroma of brown. Brown is an orange, but it is a very neutralized orange. It is not very chromatic.

Think of the earlier example when we compared the intensity of a yellow lemon to the intensity of yellow mustard. The yellow mustard is a more neutral yellow than the yellow of the lemon.

Now think about orange. A very intense orange, like the color of an orange fruit, is highly chromatic.

But if you think of other examples of the color orange, such as a bad spray-on tan, it is still orange but less chromatic than the fruit.

If you neutralize it even more than that, you will get brown.

So, the reason brown is not on the color wheel as a separate color is because it’s already there – orange! The hue of brown is orange.

So now what? How can this help you mix brown paint?

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A Formula for Exactly How to Mix Brown Paint

Now that we know the three elements of every color (value, chroma, and hue), and have recognized that brown is in fact a neutralized orange, we are ready to start mixing brown paint.

There are 3 steps to mixing brown paint

• Step 1: Make orange paint.
• Step 2: Make a neutral paint
• Step 3: Add your neutral paint to your orange paint.
• Step 4: Adjust the value

Each of these steps requires a little bit more knowledge to execute successfully. Here is what you need to know in order to mix brown paint successfully.

Read more about Colour Theory here.

Step 1: Make orange paint

Because brown is a neutralized orange, we need to start by making the color orange. You can do this by adding yellow and red together to make orange.

But it is not quite that simple. Many people think that you need to take equal parts red and equal parts yellow to make orange paint, but that is not quite true.

Different pigments have different strengths. Red is often a much stronger pigment than yellow. So if you want to make orange paint, you need to add quite a bit more yellow than red in order for it to come out orange.

Step 2: Make a neutral paint

Mixing a truly neutral paint is worthy of its own post, but I will put a simplified version of it here.

A neutral color is a color that doesn’t look like any color on the color wheel.

It is like a grey, but it is not a green-grey, or blue-grey, or red-grey, or yellow-grey. It is a grey that doesn’t look like any other color.

You can make this color by mixing together red, yellow, and blue. This mixture is called a chromatic neutral, which sounds contradictory but you do not need to worry about it too much for mixing brown paint.

What you do need to worry about is mixing red, yellow, and blue together until they look like no color.

But be careful! Remember that different colors have different strengths of pigment. You cannot take equal parts of red, yellow, and blue and expect to get a true neutral.

And there is one other pitfall to watch out for! When you mix red, yellow, and blue together, the color will look quite dark. It’s hard to tell if it is truly neutral or not when it is so dark in value.

This is why you also want to add some white paint to your neutral. By lightening the value, it makes it easier to see if your mixture is truly neutral.

It’s important that your mixture is the most non-color (kind of greyish) possible in order to mix brown paint successfully in the next step.

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Step 3: Add the neutral paint to the orange paint in order to mix brown paint

So far you should have mixture of orange and one mixture of neutral.

In order to neutralize the orange in order to turn it into brown, we need to add some of the neutral paint to the orange paint.

BUT BE CAREFUL! GO SLOW!

Do not add too much neutral to your orange paint too quickly. Your neutral mixture is going to be stronger than your orange mixture. Therefore, you need to add small amounts of neutral to your orange mixture at a time.

As you slowly add neutral paint to the orange, you will notice that it will start to turn brown.

If you want to mix a brown that still feels pretty orange, like a bad spray-tan, you don’t need to add very much neutral.

If you want to mix brown that is very brown, you will need to add more of your neutral paint to the orange.

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Step 4: Adjust the value of your brown paint

Once you have mixed a brown that feels the right amount of brown to you, there is one more step to consider.

Remember that one of the three elements of color is value, or how light or dark your brown paint is.

If the brown you mixed is too light, you can darken it by mixing a neutral that does not have white in it.

Another way to darken the value is to add a little black to it, but be careful about adding too much black because black is actually a very dark blue, red, or purple and it will change your brown into a different color if you ad too much.

If you need to make your brown lighter in value, you can add white to it. But white is often just a very light blue, so if you add too much you will change your brown into a different color.

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Voila! You just learned how to mix brown paint.

Mixing brown paint can be a struggle. It is a very finicky color to mix, because if you add too much neutral or not enough, you won’t get the exact color of brown you are looking for.

You also have to balance the value out, often with white or black, which can change the overall color of your brown.

But, if you understand the underlying principles of value, chroma, and hue, and follow these detailed instructions, you will be mixing browns in no time.

Read More Color Theory Articles:

Colour Theory

How to Make Blue Colors

How to Make Purple Paint

How to Make Yellow Darker

Color Theory for Beginners

Color Theory Lesson Plans

Have you tried mixing brown? Let me know in the comments below. How did it go? What was hard? What was easy?

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It’s a lot more complicated than just mixing red and blue together. Here is everything you need to know about how to make purple paint.

The Basics of How to Mix Purple Paint

Here is the nitty gritty about how to make purple paint. Take some red, add some blue, and then voila! Purple paint.

Except not really.

If you have ever mixed red and blue together and got, well, muddy brown, this is why. And don’t worry, we will teach you how to fix it.

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How Color Works

Every color has a value, a chroma, and a hue.

Value is how light or dark a color is.

Chroma is how intense the color is.

Hue is where it lands on the color wheel – red, orange, yellow, green, blue or purple.

Want more great color theory information? Read this article on colors opposites on the color wheel.

Ugh, What Is This Purple Sludge? How Do I Make Purple Paint Look More Purple-y?

The problem with purple is that when you mix red, which is a fairly dark-value color, with blue – which is a very dark-value color, the resulting color is so dark that it is difficult to decipher whether or not it is even purple.

One quick fix? Add white.

White will lighten the value of your red-and-blue-sludge, and make it appear more purple-y.

Want more great color theory information? Check out this Colour Theory article.

What If I Want to Make a Better Purple Paint?

If you want a more purple-y purple, you need to find a better paint to start with.

Dioxazine purple, for example, is much more chromatic than any purple you can mix with just red and blue.

This is because any time you mix two colors together, the resulting color will be more neutralized than many colors that come directly out of the tube.

The reason for this has a lot to do with things I do not claim to be an expert on – something about particle size of pigments and how they lock together.

But what I DO care about is mixing the exact color that I want. And I know that if I want to mix a purple color that is very intense (chromatic) that my best bet is to reach for my tube of purple paint.

Barring that, if you only have red and blue to mix your purple with, adding white to the mixture helps the purple come alive a bit more than the dark brown sludge red and blue make on their own.

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How Do I Mix THE RIGHT Purple?

What also matters when it comes to purple is how reddy-purple versus bluey-purple you want your final purple to appear.

Every color can be both warm and cool. And purple is no exception.

Do you need to know how to make a purple that is warm? Make sure to add more red than blue.

Do you need to know how to make purple that is cool? Make sure to add more blue than red.

Read More Color Theory Articles:

Colour Theory

How to Make Blue Colors

How to Make Purple Paint

How to Make Brown Paint

How to Make Yellow Darker

Color Theory for Beginners

Color Theory Lesson Plans

What do you think about mixing purples? Let me know in the comments below.

Check out our free Color Theory Lesson Plans

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How to make blue colors? It’s easy if you know these 3 simple tricks for mixing blues.

First, let’s start with the basics.

Every color is composed of three elements: value, chroma, and hue.

Value is how light or dark a color is.

Chroma is how intense the color is.

Hue is where it lands on the color wheel – red, orange, yellow, green, blue or purple.

Want to learn even more about value, chroma and hue? Our art lesson plan worksheets teach you everything you need to know about color.

How to Mix Different Values of Blues

Blues can be very light and in value, like a baby blue. In order to make your blue lighter in value, you can add white. Simple enough.

Blues can also be very dark in value.

In fact, most people don’t realize that black is often just a very dark blue.

So if you need to make your blue darker, one option is to add black to it.

However, black is much more neutral than a sky blue. So not only will it darken your blue, it will also neutralize it, which we will discuss in a moment.

Another option to make your blue appear lower in value is to add a blue that is darker in value than the one you currently are using.

For example, if you are using a cerulean blue (which is medium in value), and add ultramarine blue (which is darker than cerulean blue in value), it will darken your overall blue when mixed together.

Enjoying learning about color? This article gives you a deep dive into colour theory.

How to Adjust the Chroma of Blues

Most blues that we observe in the natural world are not super chromatic. In other words, many blues are not very intense. They are the opposite of chromatic. They are neutralized blues.

If you look at the ocean in New England, for example, there is a lot of particulate in the water which makes it appear muddy. The ocean in New England is still decidedly blue, just not a very intense blue. We would say it is a neutralized blue.

So, if you want to paint the ocean off the coast of Maine, how would you mix that blue?

If you want to neutralize the color blue, but NOT change its value, you need to add a neutral that is the same lightness/darkness as the blue you are using.

So if you are using a medium blue paint, but it is too intense (or chromatic), then you need to find a neutral that is the also medium in value.

A true neutral is a color that is as close to NO color as you can get. It’s like a grey, except that it is not even a little bit red-grey, or blue-grey, or yellow-grey. It is a grey that has no discernible color.

If you want to adjust the intensity of your blue, but NOT change the value, then you need to add a grey that is the same value as the blue you are using.

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Chromatic neutral? How is this a thing?

One answer to your troubles is to mix what is called a chromatic neutral, and then add this neutral to your blue paint in order to diminish its chroma.

A chromatic neutral is a no-color color that is made by mixing yellow, blue, and red together.

Now, it is important to know that not all pigments are created equal. Some are stronger than others. Red, for example, is often much more potent than yellow.

So in order to make a chromatic neutral, you cannot expect to mix equal amounts of red, yellow, and blue together and get a grey that is perfectly neutral.

Instead, you will likely have to mix a lot of yellow, with a medium amount of red, and a slightly less amount of blue. (This of course, all depends exactly on what the quality of paint you are using is as well as the specific pigments in your paint.)

Mixing red, yellow, and blue together WILL get you a neutral color, however it is very difficult to determine exactly what the color is when the value of the neutral is dark. Therefore, I encourage you to ALSO add white to your mixture. This will lighten the overall color and make it easier to determine if you are getting close to a true neutral.

Keep adding small amounts of red, yellow and/or blue (and maybe more white if you can’t tell what color it is) until you have a color that doesn’t look even a little bit orange, or green.

Tada! You’ve mixed your first chromatic neutral.

If you add a small amount of this chromatic neutral to your blue, it will neutralize it. The more you add, the more “muddy” your blue will become.

If you are painting the ocean off of Maine, you will need to add a lot of neutral to get the famous murky color of the ocean there.

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The Chroma Catch

A more difficult problem artists face is how to mix a blue that is MORE chromatic than the blue you have on your palette.

The answer is YOU CAN’T.

You CANNOT make any color more chromatic than it already is UNLESS…

You add a MORE chromatic blue to the blue you already have.

This means you need a NEW BLUE. Cerulean blue, Pthalo blue – these are notoriously chromatic blues.

But if you mix white with your ultramarine blue, you are not going to be able to make that bright-clear-sky-over-the-Arizona-desert blue. It’s simply not chromatic enough. You need to add a more chromatic blue to your palette to achieve that effect. (And a cooler one – this blue has more yellow in it than ultramarine blue.)

Learn more about opposites on the color wheel here.

How to Adjust the Hue of Blues to Get Exactly the Right Color

Now we come to what I believe is the trickiest element of painting the right blue for your purpose – the hue.

Did you know that blue can be either warm or cool?

It’s true.

If the blue looks like it leans closer to the green part of the color wheel than the purple part of the color wheel, we say it is a “cool blue”.

If the blue looks like it leans closer to the purple part of the color wheel more than the green part of the color wheel, we say it is a “warm blue”. This is because if it leans towards purple, it has a little bit of red in it (remember, purple is made of red + blue).

Don’t Be Blue About Blues

With this guide, try practicing mixing different blues that you see around you. Now that you know what to look for, you will be able to get closer and closer to the color of blue you are trying to make.

Want to learn even more about art? Our art lesson plan worksheets teach realistic drawing and painting skills.

Read More Color Theory Articles:

Colour Theory

How to Make Blue Colors

How to Make Purple Paint

How to Make Brown Paint

How to Make Yellow Darker

Color Theory for Beginners

Color Theory Lesson Plans

Discover more great color theory lessons here.

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Color wheels can be confusing, but this article describes how to accurately find colors opposite on the color wheel.

What is a color wheel?

A color wheel is circle with colors around it, and sometimes inside it. The outside circle almost always represents the hues of various colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue or purple).

The inside of the circle sometimes show the colors getting lighter or darker (the value). Other times, the inside of the circle shows varying chromas.

If you don’t know what these words mean yet, don’t panic! By the end of this article you will know all their definitions.

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How It Works

In order to find the compliment of any color, use a color wheel as a guide. Whatever is directly across from a color is its opposite.

For example, directly across from blue on the color wheel is orange. The opposite of green is red. The opposite of yellow is purple, etc.

But what happens if your color isn’t exactly the same as the relatively few colors on this color wheel? Then what?

Ever wonder why black and white aren’t on the color wheel? This article explains why.

A Case Study: Blue

The opposite of blue on the color wheel is orange. That is the simple answer.

However, it can be more complex than that.

It really depends on what kind of blue you are looking to find the compliment of.

For example, if you are looking at a very light blue, then you need to find an orange of equal lightness for it to be a true opposite.

On the color wheel above, you can see that each color becomes lighter as it gets closer to the center of the circle. So if your blue is the lightest blue available, you want to match it with the color opposite of it that is also the lightest available.

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But what about the “weird” blues?

Sometimes, the blue we are trying to find the opposite of is not such an obvious blue. Take blue jeans for example. They are blue, sure, but not as intense of a blue as what you see in the color wheel above.

Blue jeans are a neutralized blue. They are like a blueish grey. A little bit muddied in appearance. But still blue.

On the color wheel above, you can see that there are three different versions of blue, Blue 1, Blue 2, and Blue 3.

Blue 1 is the most bluey blue. It is the most chromatic. But Blue 2 is still blue, just not as intense as Blue 1. And Blue 3 is the most neutralized of all, but still a blue.

So if you are looking at a blue, and trying to find blue’s opposite on a color wheel, you need to figure out how intense of a blue it is.

If it is a very intense blue, its compliment on the color wheel is a very intense orange.

If it is a neutralized blue, it’s complement on the color wheel is a neutralized orange.

Want to learn even more about the nuances of color? Follow along with these free color theory lessons.

Finding Colors with Confidence

I hope this article helps you to find colors with more confidence. Did you learn something new? Let me know in the comments below!

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Yellow. The trickiest color to learn to make darker. But why is it so hard?

The answer to “How to make yellow darker?” is somewhat complex. It requires a deep dive into color theory, so here we go.

Value, Chroma & Hue

Every color is composed of three elements: value, chroma, and hue.

Value is how light or dark a color is.

Chroma is how intense the color is.

Hue is where it lands on the color wheel – red, orange, yellow, green, blue or purple.

Obviously, in this article we are dealing with the hue yellow. We want to know how to make yellow darker.

Okay, so far we know we are dealing with the hue yellow. But what about the other two elements?

The intensity of the yellow, or the chroma of yellow, also matters. Most often when we think of yellow, it is a very bright, chromatic yellow – like the yellow of a lemon.

But there are also other kinds of yellows out there.

For example, mustard is considered yellow, but it is not nearly as intense as lemon yellow. It’s what we call a neutralized yellow.

Neutral is the opposite of chroma.

The problem with trying to make yellow darker is that we cannot do so without affecting the chroma – or intensity – of the yellow. We will circle back to this in a moment.

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How to Make Yellow Darker

The final element of a color is its value. Is it a very light value or a very dark value?

We are trying to figure out how to make yellow darker. This means we need to take the hue, yellow, and somehow bring the value down.

The most obvious way to do this is to add black to yellow.

But if you do this, something strange will happen… the yellow will turn into green.

(Read this article on black and white to learn why black – which is often just a very dark blue – will turn yellow into green.)

And this is he entire trick to making yellow darker.

In order to make yellow darker, you have to add a darker color to it. This will do two things to the yellow.

It will neutralize the yellow (just like mustard is darker than lemon yellow but is darker in value).

It will also turn the yellow into a green.

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How can this be?

If you think about it, green is a combination of yellow PLUS blue. So in a way, green IS a kind of yellow.

A neutralized yellow-green IS a dark yellow.

This is why when you look at paintings by the Old Masters that have gold objects, you will notice that green is often used to represent a dark yellow.

Check out this colour theory article for more great colour theory information.

Look to the Past to Learn How to Make Yellow Darker

One artist that is well-known for painting gold objects is Emil Carlson. Look at one of his paintings below.

Notice how dark the yellow/gold object reads to the viewer?

Try to look at each of the colors he uses to paint the gold objects in isolation by focusing on just one small part of the gold bowl. Do you see the neutral green?

In fact, the only truly “yellow” hue used in the gold bowl at all are the highlights he places on the rim.

If you truly want to master how to make yellow darker, the best thing you can do is study how the artists of the past managed such a feat.

There is so much to learn from them.

I hope you now feel confident about how to make yellow darker in your own paintings.

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Check out our other color theory articles:

Colour Theory

Opposites on the Color Wheel

Color Theory Lessons

Color Theory for Beginners

Is white a color? What about black?

When I was growing up, one of the first color theory lessons I remember learning is ROYGBIV, which is an acronym for the order of colors in a rainbow – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. White didn’t get a letter in the acronym, Why not?

And then there were color wheels. Lots and lots of color theory wheels. But although I learned that red and yellow make orange, I never knew where white belonged on the color wheel. Or black. Black isn’t in ROYGBIV, where does it go?

Check out our extensive worksheets that teach color theory skills.

Value, Chroma and Hue

I eventually learned the mysterious answers to these questions, and they stem from the concept that there are three elements to every color: value, chroma, and hue. These three elements together are the key to understanding color theory.

Hue is essentially ROYGBIV. It represents the outermost circle of the color wheel. Between red and yellow is orange. Between orange and yellow is yellow orange. Between yellow and yellow-orange is yellow-yellow-orange, etc. These are all called “hues”.

Chroma is how intense the color is. Purveyors of Caribbean vacations are often quick to showcase the “azure” water on island beaches. This water is appealing to us because it is intensely colored. There is less particulate in the water than the greyer seas found in New England, which gives Caribbean waters the appearance of a more intense blue.

So although New England waves are blue, and Carribean island waves are blue, the Caribbean water is more chromatic – it is a more intense color of blue. The opposite of chroma is neutral. The New England water is a bluish grey and the blue is not very intense, it’s a neutralized blue.

Value represents how light or dark a color is. A stop sign is red, and poinsettias also red. But even though they are both red, the red stop sign is a lighter value of red than the darker red of a poinsettia. The ponsettia is a darker value of red than that of the stop sign.

Now that we have mastered the 3 basic elements of color, let’s take a closer look at why white and black are not actually colors.

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White

Have you ever tried to match whites before – say a shirt and pants –  and been aggravated by the experience of trying to find the right white? When you put the two together, something just doesn’t look right?

 So here’s the rub: the reason it is so difficult to match a white top with white pants is because there’s no such thing as white. White is not a color.

Think about it for a minute. Where does white go on the color wheel? Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. I’m a licensed art teacher and I have never seen or heard anyone throw a “white” in there. There’s no “W” in ROYGBIV.

Is White a Color?

White is actually more of a color adjective than anything else. Saying something is “white” is actually a descriptor for saying a color is very, very, very light in value. So, the “white” being described is really just a very, very light red, orange, yellow, green, blue or purple.

When you hear interior decorators talk about a “warm white”, what they are usually describing is a very light-in-value yellow or orange. When they talk about “cool whites” they are often describing very light blues or purples.

To be fair, the lighter a color is, the more difficult it is to discern its color. This is why so many people believe that white exists as its own color – it’s a catchall for any color that is light in value.

But if you take time to compare whites to each other, and then try to describe them as a very light red, orange, yellow, green, blue, or purple, you will find that they are easier to identify with practice.

I encourage you to try it now; look around the room and see if you can find three different “white” objects. If you HAD to assign a color to each of the whites, what would it be? It’s often helpful to put them next to each other for reference. Side-by-side, it is often easier to tell which white is warmer and which white is cooler, which is the first step to identifying its true color.

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Why Does It Matter?

Why should you bother spending time deciphering whites? Well, for one it is a great parlor trick to pull out the next time someone you’re being forced to converse with is being annoying. Also, it could keep you from losing your mind in a very different way.

White Torture

There is a type of psychological torture called “white torture” that is used to extract information from targets by depriving them of sensory input. This often includes putting them in a white room, serving them white food, making them wear white clothing, etc.

Fortunately for the would-be torturers, there is no such thing as white. Armed with a thorough understanding of the concept “white”, well-trained prisoners can identify the broad rainbow of whites within their orbit, and stave off the intended distress of being placed in a world “without color”.

A well-practiced eye can see that the pillow case is a very light blue, and the mashed potatoes are a very light red. They can even take joy in knowing that their pants and shirt are actually very different colors despite the certainty of captors that they are white.

Dentists Know Whites

If you care about teeth, you might also want to pay closer attention to whites.

When making composite fillings, dentists have access to any variety of pre-mixed “whites”, and often have cards to help them choose which one to use on which patient. But they also have to cope with varying light sources, the fact that teeth are slightly transparent, and many other variables which affect the way humans view the dentist’s color choices in their final work.

Being able to break down “whites” into value, chroma, and hue can improve your dentist’s ability to match colors accurately because it isolates complex variables to be independently thought upon before making color-matching decisions. The next time you go to the dentist for a composite filling, I encourage you to check their art credentials.

Light Has Color

Understanding the properties of white is also highly beneficial to anyone who needs to buy a lightbulb. Have you ever really noticed how many options there are? How some lightbulbs claim to be “natural light” bulbs, and others “warm”? What they are really saying is that they are selling various light-value hues (ROYGBIV) of light bulbs.

The bulb described as “warm” is actually a very light value yellow. The bulb described as “natural” is actually a very light value blue. That’s right, natural light has a color, and it is blue. Considering the oceans and sky reflect blue, is it surprising that natural light does as well?

So the next time you are out lightbulb shopping, use your new color theory knowledge to make informed choices about which color you wish your light to be. Do you want your inside to feel like the outside? Pick the blue-hue bulb. Do you want your room to feel like light casting from a fire? Go for that yellowy-orange one.

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Black

Black also doesn’t appear to have a home on the color wheel. This is because black is a very low value (dark) blue, purple, or even sometimes red.

If you ever drop water onto black ink, it runs blue or purple, or less commonly red. The value of these blues, purples, and reds is so dark, that we cannot see the hue very easily, and resort to calling it “black” which is a catchall phrase for very dark hues. When our water thins the pigment (and lightens the value) of the black ink, the hue becomes more easily decipherable. It becomes downright obvious, in fact, as we see it run in streams of hues that we DO recognize from the color wheel: reds, blues, and purples.

I will never forget the first time my mother turned to my five-year-old self while shopping to tell me the pants I picked out to match a shirt were the “wrong black”. My mind was blown – how could there be a “wrong black”? That was the first of many color lessons my mother taught me growing up through the palette of clothes-shopping.

I now understand that what my mother described as the “wrong” black was actually two different blacks with varying root colors. Some were very dark reds, while other were very dark blues or purples. So the shirt I had in my hand was a very dark value red, while the pants I mistakenly thought matched it were actually a very dark value blue. And my mother was right, the pants were the wrong black.

Conclusion

It takes training and knowledge to see the nuanced distinctions between different blacks and different whites. The lighter a color is, like what is commonly called “white”, the more difficult it is to discern its hue. The same is true for very dark colors. When something is very, very dark, it is difficult to tell which hue it is.

The important thing to remember is that whites and blacks both have hues. If you approach them with the knowledge that there is a ROYGBIV color in there somewhere, you are more likely to spot it. And by looking for these subtle differences between white and black hues, you can expand the color information your eye receives and processes.

What other colors are color wheel misfits? Let me know which ones you are curious about in the comments below.

Want to learn more art skills? Check out our Ateliyay! Curriculum today!

• Oil Paint Materials List
• Painting Composition: The Key to Making Better Art
• Realistic Portrait Drawing
• Guide to Black Oil Paints
• Choosing the Right White: A Guide to White Oil Paints