So you want to get better at colour mixing and painting lovely things?
Welcome! (slightly evil laughter)
What if there was an exercise you only had to do once to completely revolutionize your approach to colour mixing? Get your shoes on, maybe a hat (people don't wear enough hats these days), and we're off on an adventure that will change you as a painter.
Before we head out, although what I write here is applicable to any medium where we mix or blend colours, I'm focusing on oil paint. For watercolourists and others that use the white of the paper and saturation as value control, there are some good stuff in here too, but probably only for people willing to break out of the modern restrictions to use "transparent pigments only". For the rest of you watercolourists, the TLDR is to pick the paper colour to match the painting.
For everyone else, let's solve that chalky and milky colour problem once and for all.
You ready?
Head to any DIY, hardware, or other shop that sells house paint, for like, painting walls.
No, seriously, once you are finished here. Do it.
Anyone can say anything on the internet - even me (evil grin) - give it a try for yourself.
So we head into the paint (for houses) shop and it stinks of chemicals, but never mind. There are swatches of fashionable colours on the wall to the left. The lighting is flickering florescent daylight bulbs. The shoes squeak on the floor, especially if we went to one of those high-end shops. Let's pretend we did. The paint professional is in the back, ignoring us through a cutout in the wall, with the effort of a cat who needs you to know you are being ignored. And we walk up to the paint swatches with White on our mind.
There's lots of cream. Blue cream. Peach cream. Tiny patches of this among the sea of colour. Although, not much white. Maybe these two at the bottom corner of this section? Are they white? Sort of grey when compared to all the other swatches.
A sigh of frustration is the key to get the paint expert to greet you. We must go through these rituals.
Small talk ends and we pop the question "Do you have any white paint?"
The pause hangs in the air like a physical thing we could reach out and pop with a pin. If we look carefully, we can see them spinning through the thoughts.
Do these guys actually know what white paint is? How much explaining do they want or should I just choose one and say it's white? Where did they get those snazzy hats? I want to start wearing more hats... This lasts, oh, maybe half a second. Sometimes up to three seconds (and yes, I've done this a few times just for fun - you do know I'm evil, right?).
You might have to push them a bit (with words), but eventually we get to a place where they admit, "we don't actually have white paint. No one does. We have over 200 colours called white, but none of them are actually white white. They are all slightly one colour or another."
The last place I asked was super-posh and sold actually non-toxic milk paint for walls. They had over 600 whites and could order from a catalogue that had double that again. All flavours of white. None of them actually white white.
(Flavours of paint is metaphorical. Don't eat paint)
Well, there you go. You don't need to read any more. That tells you everything. White qua white does not exist in this world. (what's qua?)
I would love to blame the digital revolution for this next problem. But alas, computers may have made it worse, but it actually starts about two hundred years ago. White becomes Y-ified.
Actually, it's about the same time Y looses it's full vowel status. It becomes "sometimes Y". Same too with white. It looses colour status. It's no longer a colour, it is now a value-modifier. White suddenly means not just the paint colour, but the quality of whiteness perfected (qua means something like that. It's a pretentious way to say the most qualified quality that makes a thing a thing or something) . A whiteness that is so neutral, it cannot exist on earth - although sunlight comes close.
Real white is suddenly a value adjuster. It has no other function or personality in painting. It exists to make things lighter.
And this, my friends, is where art - and art education - goes horribly wrong.
Vocabulary time
Colour - Hue would be the most technical word for how I'm using this here. Although I am also mixing the word colour to also mean the name on the paint packaging. Aka, paint colour
Value - sometimes called tone. It's how much lightness or darkness something has. We can see this really well in a black and white photo. It's also an easy cheat for those who hate colour theory. Get the values right and you don't need to care about colour.
Saturation - This one is a bit tricky. It's the Much-ness of a colour. How intense or strong a specific colour is.
It's easier to see when compared to desaturated. Desaturated colour is a kind of a not-strong-at-all colour, like how the mud on my boots aren't really brown, but are a desaturated red-orange. Greys and browns and chalky pastels are all desaturated versions of other colours. Whereas firetrucks are usually highly saturated colours of red or yellow or... I don't know what other colours fire trucks are. Purple?
Where we used to lighten a colour, we whiten it. We add white because white is light. And light is white. Or so we are taught now.
Same with darkening a colour, we see this the same as blackening it.
And over time, this idea gets contorted. We are taught that colour is separate from value. We learn these rules and stop looking. This rule of adding white to lighten a colour stops us looking at what is actually happening.
I think that's a shame.
I feel strongly that people would have a much easier time learning colour theory and colour mixing if white (and black) could be a colour again.
If you have one of those phone gadgets (or a friend with one), the Pantone app is great for learning about colour. They make a huge science of it and every little shift in colour is categorized. Like colour theory taken to the most foolish extremes. Maybe don't use this when you are painting.
However, after poking about the house, looking at a few different objects and observing how the colour changes in different lighting, gather a pile of things that look the most white ever. A bit of paper. Maybe a flower. How about the ribbon on your new hat? See what the app has to say? It's very good at finding out if an object really is white.
And they won't be white. I bet you my new hat that every one of them is blue-leaning. They are a very pale (value), desaturated (saturation), blue (hue). That's because our eyes are weird.
No, not how we see stuff. The physical makeup of the two gooey little orbs in our head. The goo and other stuff that fills them isn't crystal clear. This changes the light as we see it. Eyes have biology. And as a result of biology, what looks white to us... the most white that could ever exist or not in the world. This is blue. Because science (aka, about 9 volumes of two inch thick books).
This is also why bleach (chemicals that make things white) makes cloth look yellow. It's making them closer to white. White looks yellow to us. To make the crisp linen shirt look white, we add bluing to the laundry. It's a bright blue dye to make clothes a very pale (value), desaturated (saturation), blue. Now it looks white.
We see very light, desaturated, blue as if it is white. Like A COLOUR! And it is a colour. In the world where we have paint on our palettes, white is a c o l o u r!
Remembering that dramatically changes how we use it in painting and mixing colours. Because white is a colour.
As pink is a kind of pale, desaturated red, white is usually a pale, desaturated blue (although it can also be a yellow... more on that much later).
In oil painting, we see Titanium White as the most white of them all.
It isn't really. But it is because our eyes see it is. And art is more about what our eyes see than what science badgers us with. (although science is useful for fixing problems like chalky paint mixing).
Okay, so how does all this stop me getting chalky and milky colours when I'm painting?
What is chalky oil painting? What is a chalky colour?
The problem is, chalky is a subjective work in art. But in general, we can assume when someone says a colour looks chalky or milky, they have gone too far in a general direction.
When I was a kid, the chalk board at the front of the school room was black and the chalk was white. When the chalk was erased, the board was no longer black, but sort of a milky, light grey colour. It was chalky.
Chalky means the colour is lighter (value) and bluer (hue) than the desired colour.
Another way to put it is:
chalky colour is cooler and paler than the colour we want.
The opposite of chalky would be muddy colour, which is redder (warmer) and less saturated than the desired colour.
(another thing people can mean when they talk about chalky oil painting, especially the painting becoming chalky as it dries, is a problem called "sinking in" but that's for another day - tldr, it's made worse by using solvents)
Here's a video for those who want to geek out more about why thinking of white as a colour helps take your painting to a whole better level:
Basically, if the colour is too chalky, and you want to fix it, have a look and ask, does it need more yellow or more red? And if there is doubt, put it into three piles. Leave the first pile alone, the second gets red, the third gets yellow. See what happens. It's your paint. You are allowed to experiment with it.
That's a simple way to fix chalky colours. But I'm more interested in preventing them. Hang on to your hat, I've got some tricks for that.
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