Why You Need Two Of Everything

By the time we`ve got up to A Level, and hopefully earlier, we all know that the primary colours are red, yellow and blue. They can`t be created by mixing other colours. They CAN be used to create the secondary colours of green (yellow + blue); orange (yellow + red) and purple (red + blue). Or can they?

Well, not always.

That`s because you only get pure colours when you`re mixing light. All the primary colours we buy in bottles or tubes contain small amounts of at least one of the other primaries; depending on the colour you`re trying to mix, this may be an advantage - or not. Yellow paint will either be ever-so-slightly green (i.e. it contains blue) OR ever-so-slightly orange (contains red); blues will tend towards either green or purple, and reds will tend either towards orange or purple. Learning to recognise which is which, purely by observation, is a very useful skill. And you can learn it just by looking at say, two tubes of yellow paint of different types. Both yellows, yes. But the same colour? Hardly.

Art suppliers, especially those that offer `Beginners` Sets` don`t do much to help. Typically, a small set will contain:

Lemon yellow (this is slightly green); Alizarin Crimson (all sorts of mucky shades in there making it difficult to use it to mix ANY clean colours at all); Ultramarine (slightly purple); Yellow ochre (ironically, this can be approximated by mixing other colours in this set); Black & White.

When a hapless beginner tries to mix a green using the yellow and blue in this set, the reddish elements in the blue will dampen down its purity. So the mix is not yellow + blue, but yellow + little bit of blue + blue + little bit of red. Mixing together the three primaries will give you shades of brown; the combination described above will give a mucky colour which is, yes, a sort of green - but one tending towards brown. This may or may not be what you were intending. If you set off intending to mix a nice cheerful, bright green, it certainly won't be.

As a short cut to despair, it's difficult to beat. Either that, or go out and buy more tubes of paint to get exactly the colour you want. If a were a cynic, I'd say that this was a ploy by paint manufacturers to get you to do just that. Perish the thought.

So my message to anyone starting out with a personal paint collection on a limited budget is to ignore the beginner's sets, and buy yourself two reds, two yellows and two blues. At the risk of stating the obvious, choose an orangey red and a purply one; an orangey yellow and a greenish one; and a purplish blue and a greenish one. You'll also need black and white. I personally would add Burnt Sienna into that collection, too (luvverly brown which can't be produced by blending the others). Also, don't use black to make your colours darker - it will just make them look as though you've mixed them in a coal scuttle. (But that's a subject for a different article!)

If you're worried about being able to tell which is which, put your different shades of yellow (for example) side by side. It will quickly be obvious.

Of course, you might want those mucky, subtle shades, especially if you're working with nature. I used to have a car whose colour was Calypso Green (look it up, under 'Images' if necessary). Deeply unfashionable, it did have the advantage of being immediately conspicuous in car parks. One day, it was parked outside an art department where I was teaching an A level art class. One of the students was painting a landscape, and started by applying green paint straight from the bottle. I invited him to step outside, and asked him:

"Do you see that car?" This was a bit like asking someone if they'd spotted the bush baby in their bowl of soup. To be fair to the student, he did nothing more than smirk slightly and nod. No comment was necessary.

I continued: "Well that's the colour you're trying to paint your landscape. Do you see those leaves? That's the colour you SHOULD be using. let's talk about it.!"

Clean colours, dirty colours - they all have their place. But make sure you eliminate despair, give yourself the choice - and get two of each of the primary colours in your collection.