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Creating Colors How Four Pigments Can Become Hundreds of Colors

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By manipulating the three attributes of a very small set of pigments, you can mix potentially hundreds, even thousands, of hues. For example, you could start with four pigments: permanent green, white, black, and cadmium red. Beginning with permanent green, we know that that pigment, right out of the tube or bottle, is already the brightest (most intense) it can be. Nothing you can add will make it brighter. Its value, however, can be lightened to make hun-

One of my fellow art teachers, Professor Doreen Gehry Nelson, having delivered a lecture 011 color, asked if anyone in the class had a question.

One student asked, "From your lecture, I gather that you like color very much. Why, then, do you always wear black?"

Professor Nelson answered, "Ah, but what color of black?"

dreds of new hues by incrementally adding white, and its value can be darkened to make hundreds of additional new hues by incrementally adding black. Permanent green, mixed first with white and then black, can go from the palest clear green to green so dark it is almost black. In addition (and this is where the proliferation of colors begins to boggle the mind), each of those value-changed hues can be incrementally dulled (intensity-changed) from bright green to no color, that is, to no discernible color, by adding its complement, cadmium red, thus doubling the number of hues (Figure 5-8).

Now consider this: You can again double the hundreds of hues achieved above by using the same set of four pigments to go through the same process, this time using cadmium red as the source color. You would first add white to red, and then add black to red to change the values from palest pink to a near-black red. Then you would use green to dull the intensity of each value-changed, red-based hue. Figure 5-8 shows only a fraction of the colors you can derive from red, green, black, and white.

By thinking of colors in this way, you arrive at some sense of the enormous number of hues—sixteen million or more—at your command with our limited palette of only seven pigments plus white and black. The key to accessing this tremendous storehouse of color, of course, is the knowledge you are gaining of how to see, identify, and mix a perceived hue—or, put another way, knowing what color you need and how to achieve it.