#art explainer

[sainamoonshine]

On paint, primary colours, and why your art teacher didn’t lie to you after all.

An explainer by SainaMoonshine

Sources: dude just trust me

Introduction: colour theory and what the internet has been telling you about it

So if you’re an artist and make digital art, or have spent any time at all online in the last 10+ years, you probably know about RGB colours versus CMYK colours.

A quick recap, just to make sure that we’re all on the same page: RGB colours is the way that your screen shows colours to you, and the way it does that is by blasting light at your eyeballs. Different light waves are perceived by your eyes as different colours. It’s called an “additive” colour model because when your eyes perceive all of the possible wavelengths at the same time, you see white. When you see no light at all (and therefore no wavelengths), you perceive that as black. So, in order to make combinations of colours, I need to combine wavelengths. Your eyes have receptors for the wavelengths of green (useful to our evolution because almost everything on this planet is some sort of green), red, and blue. So when your eye sees a wavelength that’s in between green and red it tells your brain “eeeh that’s probably yellow I guess.”

(This is, incidentally, the reason why we see magenta. Light has no corresponding wavelength for that sort of super-pink that is magenta. When it waves faster than red it becomes infrared light, which we can’t see, and when it waves faster than violet it becomes ultraviolent, which we also can’t see. But when your brain perceives a bit of red and a bit of blue, it basically just shrugs and makes up a colour to fill the blank. This is not important to the rest of this explainer, I just wanted to mention it because it’s neat.)

Given that, computer screens don’t really need to shoot all of the wavelengths at you; they only need to shoot those three primary wavelengths at different intensity and your brain adds up how much blue, red and green it sees and then makes up what colour it “should” be seeing.

(so yeah, basically when you see yellow on a screen you’re more-or-less hallucinating it. Sorry.)

Anyway that is how old computer screens used to work, with each pixel made out of three teeny-tiny little dot of red, blue and green light. Is that still how screens work now that they are flat? Who knows. Technology is magic, etc.

Now, about that other colour scheme that you might have heard about. CMYK. It’s called a “substractive” colour model and it’s the mode that you should set your photoshop file on if you intent to print something. Why is is substractive? Well, that is because when you print, you don’t print with light. You print with ink, which is basically a bunch of tiny pigment particles (or dye particles, but the distinction isn’t important here) suspended in a liquid (or a goo, or in the form of a powder). Assuming that you are printing on white paper, each layer of ink that you put down basically prevents light from bouncing off that paper and entering your eye. So when you combine colours using a physical medium like ink, you don’t get white. You get progressively LESS white, in fact. All of the inks mixed together will grab ALL of the colour waves and prevent them from richoteting into your peepers, so basically that resulting mix will appear as more-or-less black. (An ACTUAL black ink is added to printers for several reasons, one of which being that mixing cyan, magenta and yellow makes some sort of super-dark-brown-but-not-quite-black black that’s not super great to look at, and another reason being that coating a page of paper in three colours of ink is often time way too much ink than what that page can absorb. One pass of nice black is better than three superposed passes of other colours, especially when it results in a yucky subpar black anyway.)

So, basically:

When you colour with light = Red, Green and Blue are considered primary colours

When you colour with ink = Cyan, Magenta and Yellow are considered primary colours

…

Wait. Hold on. Didn’t my elementary school teacher tell me that Red, Yellow and Blue are the primary colours?

Congratulations! We have reached the reason I’m writing this explainer in the first place. And it is to tell you to stop listening to the self-proclaimed art experts on the internet that will scream at you all day that Red, Yellow and Blue are BAD and if you use them as primary colours you should feel bad and your elementary art teachers lied to you.

Because, the thing is? Go to any art store right now and try to buy a “primary colours” set of acrylics paint. It’s red, yellow, and blue. All of them are, in fact. Every single acrylics paint manufacturer in the world is selling beginners sets with Red, Yellow, and Blue as the main primary colours. Are they all wrong???? Are they lying to me, too??? Is the rando on youtube right and it’s a conspiracy???

No it’s not. Calm down. Go back up a few lines, read what I said again: When you colour with ink = Cyan, Magenta and Yellow are considered primary colours

Ink.

INK.

Ink and paint aren’t the same thing. They behave differently, my dudes.

Read more to find out why!

Why does it matter?

Because people on the internet are wrong and it bothers me.

But also, let’s say that you want to buy paint a do some art. You are standing there, frozen in the middle of the aisle at the local art store, staring at all of these tubes of red and magenta and cyan and blue and you don’t know what to do. You WANT to get the nice box of “all the essential colours” because it’s on sale, but it doesn’t have magenta and cyan, and all of the super famous art influencers on tiktok have filled your brain with the idea that red and blue are BAD and only cyan and magenta are the TRUTH. What do????

First off, I want to give you a solid reminder that no amount of mixing paint will make a nicer colour than one from a pure pigment. I know you wanna buy some yellow and blue (cyan?) and make all matter of greens with them. No green you mix will be as nice as a tube of green made with a green pigment. That doesn’t mean “do not mix colours”! Not at all!

It means: I’m about to tell you it’s possible to mix yellow and red to make orange and I don’t want you to point at the tube of cadmium orange and tell me that you didn’t manage to get this EXACT hue and therefore I’m lying. I know you can’t mix cadmium orange. You can mix something that looks at LOT like cadmium orange, okay? Okay.

So, with all that said. What primary colours SHOULD you get? Because the internet is screaming about Cyan-Magenta-Yellow but all the acrylics kits are Red-Yellow-Blue, so like. What’s up with that?

Yeah, what’s up with that? How *do* inks and paints behave differently?

The main difference between ink and paint is the binder. That’s the substance that creates the “base” of the product, and little teeny-tiny particles of pigments float inside and those make the colour. With ink, the binder is typically translucent and liquid. With paint, the binder is typically a sort of paste that may or may not be translucent.*

*This is a gross over-simplification for the purpose of entertainment. I am not a colour scientist.

Which means that when thinking about colour mixes, one must keep in mind that you can’t really add white in an ink. (I mean, you can, but you’ll get a cloudy liquid that is no longer translucent, AND it will mess up your texture. I know there are white inks. DO NOT mix them with regular ink.)

Let’s say that I want to make a red ink less red. I want to make it paler. The way to do that is to dilute it. Adding more liquid to red ink = fewer red pigments per drop of ink. I now have a paler, more liquidy and translucent ink, and when I spread it on white paper it looks pink-ish. (I personnally think that diluted red looks like diluted red and not pink, but ymmv)

But even after diluting my ink like that, I can still colour something “red”. I’ll need to apply that ink several times on my artwork in successive passes, and it will be a pain in the ass, but eventually I will still be able to get “red” out of that ink bottle because I didn’t change the colour, not really.

But what about paint?

Paint is different in that usually you want it to be opaque. (DISCLAIMER I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT WATERCOLOUR PAINT HERE DO NOT @ ME)

So if the red paint you’re using has a translucent binder, adding more binder is kind of eeeeh. I mean you’ll get a less “aggressively red” red, sure, but also a less opaque paint. Which isn’t great. (Again, I am not talking about watercolours)

BUT! Here’s the thing: you can add white to your paint. It’s okay. In fact, it’s encouraged! And a lot of premixed paint will already be premixed with a white binder, usually Titanium white because it makes for a nice bright base that really makes those other colours pop (and also it’s not lead). Some kits of acrylic paints might also come with a tube of white specifically labelled as “mixing white”!

So if you, as an artist who likes tubes of premixed paint and didn’t even know someone could make their own paint, wants a paler red, what you’re gonna do is add white. Which will probably make a nice pink, or at the very least a red-with-white-in-it sort of colour.

You have now successfully made your paint paler, but now there is no amount of superposed layers you can paint that will eventually result in red, because we’re juggling two pigments here, not just the one. And also this paint is opaque. (Not watercolour)

Okay but what does that have to do with primary colours?

It has everything to do with them! A “primary colour” is a colour that cannot be created from mixing other ones. Given that I cannot add white to make inks brighter, then the primary ink colours are those that are the brightest and most luminous on the colour wheel: cyan, magenta, and yellow. Blue, being darker than cyan, can be created by mixing cyan ink with a little bit of magenta ink, but cyan ink will never happen from blue no matter how much I dilute it or try to mix it with something else. Because the way to create cyan from blue would have to involve making it lighter, which I can’t meaningfully do with an ink.

But I can do it with paint! I can take some blue paint and add a bunch of white and a liiiiiiitle dab of yellow and voilà! Something that looks a lot like cyan had been produced. (Remember my earlier disclaimer that no paint mix is going to be as nice and shiny and vibrant as a pure pigment from the tube? Yeah, it applies here. I’m not saying that you can use blue and white and yellow paint to make something exactly like what comes out of the tube of cyan, but you can come pretty dang close.)

Same with magenta! No way no how am I ever going to make a decent magenta from red ink, but all I need is some red paint and some white and a soupçon of blue and I can make myself a pretty damned good magenta-ish paint mix. (Idem, straight from the tube > colour mixes, but good enough is what interests us here, not perfect match because perfect match just isn’t possible NO MATTER which primary colour wheel you use)

Oh, so what you’re saying is that the primary colours of paint is indeed Red, Yellow, and Blue?

Not really. You can also make red paint with magenta (+ yellow) paint. And blue paint out of cyan (+ red) paint.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Truth is that when it comes to acrylics and other types of paint (not watercolour I don’t know anything about that and in any case I inagine it would behave much like ink), you can conceivably mix almost every colour from other colours except yellow (and white). It takes some messing around but yeah. A cyan-magenta-yellow or a red-yellow-blue starter set is equally functional in theory.

Wait, so which do I choose?

It all depends on what you’re trying to paint and how much mixing you are mentally prepared to do. For example, in order to make a nice pale but vibrant green, you either need to start from a cyan + yellow or dick around with the blue to bring it down to a cyan-level of brightness and THEN mix it with yellow.

Similarly, if you want a deep dark forest green and you only have a cyan, you’re gonna have to darken that up with a little bit of red towards a more royal blue type thing before mixing it with yellow. Otherwise you might make the mistake of taking the acid green result of a cyan+yellow mix and say “oh hey I’m gonna make this green darker by adding some black!” and that’s the devil talking.

Orange mixed are also brighter when made with red rather than magenta, given that magenta has a blue undertone. Similarly, magenta = better purple.

To be quite honest, the cyan and magenta paints are so very bright that they tend to create colour mixes that aren’t “natural”, so that’s why most paint kits start you off with red and blue. If you start painting straight off the bat with the most aggressively bright hues in the colour wheel because some rando on Instagram got it into your head that a starter paint kit HAS TO include cyan and magenta, you’re going to end up with acid-green tree leaves and magenta-petaled flowers and wondering why your landscapes look wrong, even though you bought the bestest of most correct paints ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You could also just buy a kit that has all five colours, plus white and black (and maybe a decent brown). Reject conformity! Refuse to take a stance in the ‘Primary colours’ debate! There is no primary paint colour except yellow anyway! Wake up sheeple!!!

So that’s a couple of thousand words of colour theory infodumping just to say… what was your point again?

My point is that I was trying to google something about colour mixing with blue, red and yellow and saw that the internet was inundated with thousands of dumbass « oh my goooooood your art classes LIED to you about the primary colours!!!! Check out these kindergartners who are being gaslighted into thinking they should paint with red and blue paints!!! The colour wheel DEBUNKED!!! » videos and I got annoyed. It’s annoying. It’s inaccurate and it’s wrong and I’m mad about it. Red and blue are fine, the local art store isn’t scamming you by not including cyan in the starter paint pack, and your colour wheel « debunking » is ridiculous because you’re only mixing with red and yellow and blue without using white at all and then you tell me that red and yellow doesn’t result in magenta. Ofc it doesn’t, magenta’s a breed of pink, you absolute walnut!!

Anyway, TL;DR: red and yellow and blue are good starter colours for paint, CMYK is Big Ink propaganda, and yellow & white are the only true « primary » colours when it comes to paints.

[puppyeared]

filipina miku!! my mom helped me with her outfit ^_^

[evilgoodguys]

caught them doing the SIN, cos, tan (bad trigonometry joke, I'm sorry, you have permission to euthanize me)

bonus:

[starrysharks]

ghanaian miku

[stil-lindigo]

lead balloon (the tumblr post that saved me)

if this comic resonated with you, it would mean the world to me if you donated to this palestinian family's escape fund.

--

no creative notes because this isn't that kind of comic.

I know I don’t owe any of you anything but I still felt compelled to write about my long term absence. And I feel far enough away from the dangerous spot I was in to be able to make this comic. I have a therapist now, and she agreed that making this could be a very cathartic gesture, and the start of properly leaving these thoughts behind me. I am still, at seemingly random times, blindsided by fleeting desires to kill myself. They’re always passing urges, but it’s disarming, and uncomfortable. I worry sometimes that my brain’s spent so long thinking only about suicide that it’s forgotten how to think about anything else. Like, now that I've opened that door for myself, I'll never be able to fully shut it again. But I’m trying my best to encourage my mind in other directions. We'll see how that goes.

I am still donating all proceeds from my store to Palestinian causes. So far, I've donated over $15K, not including donations coming from my own pocket or the fundraising streams which jointly raised around $10K. In the time since I made my initial post about where this money would be going, the focus has shifted from aid organisations to directly donating to escape funds.

If you'd like to do the same, you can look at Operation Olive Branch, which hosts hundreds of Palestinian escape funds or donate to Safebow, which has helped facilitate the safe crossing and securing of important medical procedures for over 150 at-risk palestinians since the beginning of the genocide.

[hansoeii]

we go just right.

[bixels]

me too, luna.

[pianokantzart]

A little obsessed with the "utterly burnt out & can't quite figure out how to make it work in this economy" depiction of Mario in the concept art.

Look at him. He's so tired.

[nouverx]

*proceeds to drink the whole bottle*

Yeah Alastor you're gonna be loved and appreciated wether you want it or not :)

[noodles-and-tea]

wait this is gonna be hilarious if im wrong (which i. probably am) but when stan went through the portal did he and little stan switch places?

You’re actually right on the money

[proxycrit]

Linktober day 11: rollin’ inn

After a day fighting a volcano, the heroic group stumble back to the inn to take a Long Rest. Unfortunately for Link, his sleep is interrupted by mournful ghosts partying it up in his brain.

(Mineru and rauru were the last of their kind ever since the already small insular zonai kingdom was decimated by a strange, flesh bending plague. A lone miner found the two children, and decided to take them in despite concerns of the curse.

He raised them. When they asked him to help fight the source of their blood family’s extinction, who was he to say no?)

More about this totk au! (It all started when zelda did not get teleported into the past, and then spiraled from there)

Patreon!

[deltadoofus]

[aratribow]

Jing yuan is the kind of parent who is overtly invested in their kid's interests and thus yanqing is his gen z encyclopedia

[heynhay]

in some other realm, you are waiting for me

[soaked-doors]

a comic about wine, a wager, and reconnecting through your weird kids

-

this behemoth of a comic is finally done - and just in time for zoros birthday huehue. initially i wanted to make a zolu introspective from an outsider POV and was like you know who would have really funny input on this … mihawk. and then it spiraled into seven pages of mishanks sitting and talking. i thought it would be funny if mishanks ended up doing self imposed couples therapy the day mihawk brought luffys bounty bc well. its kind of hilarious to think abt mihawk realizing shanks was onto something all those years ago after he meets zoro and luffy. like sure this new generation is batshit crazy but my god are they cooking. anyways. cheers. get some kids

[newtid]

saw this post and could not stop thinking about @punkitt-is-here as elmo's aunt i NEEDED to draw her

also also while i was drawing i thought up a sesame street episode plot that i think is cute

Elmo's uncle is coming over to visit, but they're looking a little different! They explain to Elmo that sometimes people realise things about themselves and that they start to change, which makes them happier- and though they won't quite be the same as before, that won't make them love you any less. So even if they won't be his amazing uncle anymore, she hopes she can still be his amazing aunt.

ggyuhhg hapoy pride mont 💥🔥‼️💪

letter of the day is T