Chris, you're right to wonder about that. If you mix yellow and blue paint, you get green, not gray. However, in the machinery of the eye, a royal blue is opposite to yellow (not orange). You can test this for yourself by looking at a blue square for 30 seconds, and then let your eyes move to the white area below it.
It turns out that complements are different in additive mixtures (the realms of visual perception, theater lighting, digital art, and camera sensors) than they are in subtractive mixtures (pigments).
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| J.M.W. Turner, Norham Castle, Sunrise |
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Read More:
Previously on this blog: The Color Wheel, Part 3: Complements and Afterimages
On the excellent website: HueValueChroma: Additive Complementaries
On the excellent website: HueValueChroma: Subtractive Complementaries
Book:
Color and Light
Michal Bach has a great online app that enables you to easily see visual compliments using Hinton's Lilac Chaser.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.michaelbach.de/ot/col-lilacChaser/index.html
This is why I prefer Mussel's colour model and complementary relationships because they are based on how the eye sees colour.
And one reason, I suppose, the great Sergei Bongart kept Indian Yellow close at hand - to exploit blue.
ReplyDeleteWhat does it mean that I saw a pale peach color?
ReplyDeleteI saw a pale yellow square with a pale green fringe.
ReplyDeleteColor theory makes perfect sense when you're mixing light on a computer screen. Artists paints? Not so much.. Visual complements aren't the same as mixing complements. Van Dyke Red is a mixing complement of Phthalo Blue. It makes black when you mix them. Unfortunately I've only been able to fin it in the Liquitex heavy body line of acrylics. You can also mix Phthalo Blue with Pyrrole Orange or Vat Orange to make black.
ReplyDeleteI find it interesting that modern color theory, such as the Yurmby Color Wheel, has replaced blue with cyan. So that Cyan, Red, and Yellow are the pure pigment colors, as we observe in printer inks for example. However, subjectively Cyan looks to be a mixture, whereas Blue seems pure. It may not be scientific, but the traditional triad of Blue, Red and Yellow speak truth to me as the only unadulterated pure colors.
ReplyDeleteJoel, It has taken me a while to think of blue and cyan as distinct basic hues, not just two kinds of blues. You're right that cyan is one of the printers' primaries, but blue is a primary color of most systems of lighting. So as you say, in the world of printers' inks, blue can be regarded as a secondary, while in theater lighting, cyan is a secondary. From the perspective of the Yurmby wheel, which spans subtractive and additive systems, all six colors are regarded as co-equal primaries.
ReplyDeleteI find it interesting that, like Terrace I saw a pale peach color (after reading the 'most people see yellow' line), something close to rgb hex fff4ea which I definitely would not call yellow. I wonder if this difference in perception has something to do with my dislike of highly saturated yellow in large amounts and my enjoyment of deep blues and other cool jewel tones. It is so amazing how different one person's perception can be from another's.
ReplyDeleteJames,
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of color, have you ever made a Cornell box? I know Nathan Fowkes uses it to teach his students but I'm more under the impression students paint it from their imagination. It seems it's more used to test the accuracy of rendering software. I'm surprised it's not used in art schools to teach color and light.
Thanks,
Piya
Great stuff. Thanks so much for the post. Vision is extraordinary, Turner is amazing.
ReplyDeleteYes, I agree Terrace and Anna: I'm seeing a very light, creamy very, very warm yellow-ish (?). Extremely light though. The blue above is a slightly violet Blue. If we remove the redish-ness, try a blue more robin's egg, then we'd see a very light much warmer yellow that we may think of as more towards orange. Makes sense with the CMY framework. The Photoshop comp model goes through a mid value to get a visual comp colour - so PS comps appear much richer, though very similar hue to the after images we see which are more like inverted in value, that is a rich dark in reality gives very, very light after image and PS a comp gives a much more saturated version as a visual comp.
Chris, just for fun, as to getting gray from "B + Y": I have played with Golden's Primrose Yellow and nailed a neutral gray with Ultramarine Violet. That's a very "acidic" green-ish yellow, so the UV makes sense. A slightly warmer yellow? A slightly less violet blue to get the gray. But it's very tricky as the slightest addition of paint creates a strong colour jump unlike anywhere else across possible comp mixing pairs, in my experience. A delicate hand is needed, start with a pool/blob of yellow - adding just the littlest dot of the "blue" and judge by eye where the mix is going. Does it pass by gray? What is the bias? The comp of that would be the direction I'd need to shift in changing my blue mix. Fun stuff. Not practical for making a gray, but a fun mixing exploration.
Thanks, Glenn - that's a great app.
As always insightful and generous posts, and very interesting comment section, too!
Hello. I'm using your book Color and Light when I'm teaching my students at The University of Agder (Southern Norway) , Visual arts. Its an eye-opener to them. Its totally new to them and everybody in every school level seems to rely totally on Johannes Itten. I would like to dig into this matter in an academic way, but its hard to find academics who have written any usable text about it. Personally I find blue and yellow a far stronger compliment to each other than blue and orange, or violet and yellow. How, however could we merge interesting findings from Johannes Ittens Color theory of contrasting colors with this new view (Yurmby)? It could be possible to combine your findings (as an artist) with Goethes (as a philosopher and scientist), but what about the contrast-theories...?
ReplyDeleteThank you for inspirational and eye-opening art, blog etc.!
Magne Myhren
Magne, a good website that talks about additive vs. subtractive complements is HueValueChroma. You can find one page on the topic here: http://www.huevaluechroma.com/043.php
ReplyDelete