painting

[rgdavey1]

how do you make the colour black

[violetblue]

I think my art teacher told me you can't get true black. Certainly, if you've ever handwashed black clothes, the colour that comes out is dark green/purple/blue but never what I'd call black. Not sure if that's fact or fiction, but I think it's correct.

[Mikeyd2]

Equal amounts of the primary colours red , yellow and blue paints is the theory for black ......

Here's the theory apparently....


Historically, painters and printers (and color theorists relying on paint or ink mixtures) based their color wheel on the RYB primary colors (red/yellow/blue). This wheel was divided into sixths by the addition of three "secondary" paint mixtures (orange, green, and purple) created by the mixture of two primary colors in equal proportions. A third category, "tertiary" colors, was originally conceived as any color containing all three primary colors (in effect, muted or grayed colors), but contemporary practice is to define them as the mixture of a primary color with a neighbor secondary color; these are located on the color wheel between the primary and secondary colors in the mixture

[Tatty Rollox]

..... he did it his way .....

[jno]

black is supposedly what you get when you mix all your colours together. The Impressionists figured there was no such thing in nature, and always used dark versions of other colours to represent shadows.
But black light is the absence of any colour - if you mix all colours of lights together you get white.

[violetblue]

I assumed you'd know about the colour wheel, rgdavey, but Mikey, I have never successfully produced black by mixing, say, all three primary colours - I just get a horrid mucky colour.

On jno's point about light, the other difference is that with colours, the primary colours are red, yellow and blue, whereas with light, the primary colours are red, green and blue (mixing red and green light gives yellow).