Primary colours, tints and shades

1Three colours, hundreds of values

A sign painter in Nyabugogo, a muralist decorating a school wall and a student with a small box of poster paints often start with the same few tubes: red, yellow, blue, white and black. From those five they can make a whole painting. This unit concentrates on one part of that skill, value: making each colour lighter or darker so that a painting has light, shadow and depth. In Unit 1 you controlled value with pencil pressure and hatching; now you will control it with paint.

2Key vocabulary

• Hue: the name of a colour, such as red or blue.
• Primary colours: red, yellow and blue. In painting they cannot be mixed from any other colours, and most other hues can be mixed from them. (Printers use a different set, magenta, yellow and cyan, and screens mix light from red, green and blue, but painters work with red, yellow and blue.)
• Neutrals: white, black and the greys between them. They are not hues; they change a colour's value.
• Value: how light or dark a colour is.
• Tint: a hue made lighter by adding white. Pink is a tint of red.
• Shade: a hue made darker by adding black. Maroon is a shade of red; navy is a shade of blue.

3Every hue has its own value

Take a photograph of the three primaries with a phone set to black and white, or simply squint at them. Yellow turns into a light grey, red into a middle grey and blue into a dark grey. This matters: pure yellow can never be the darkest part of a painting, and pure blue can never be the lightest, unless you change their values with white and black.

4Mixing tints

• Put the white on the palette first, then add the colour a tiny amount at a time. Colour is much stronger than white: a dot of blue the size of a grain of rice changes a spoonful of white.
• Mix until the tint is completely even, with no streaks of white.
• A ratio tells you how much of each paint to use. "1 part blue to 4 parts white" means one spoonful (or one brush-load) of blue to every four of white.

5Mixing shades

• Put the colour down first and add black in tiny touches on the tip of the brush. Black is the strongest paint on the palette and quickly swallows the hue.
• Watch yellow. Yellow mixed with black does not give dark yellow: it turns olive green. To make a darker yellow that still looks warm, add the smallest touch of red and blue together instead.
• Shades of red can look brown and shades of blue look navy. Both are useful for shadows.

Worked example: a five-step blue ladder

Niyonzima wants five values of blue for a sky and a lake. He works with a plastic spoon and records his ratios.

He needs 18 spoonfuls of the step 2 tint for the whole sky. With a ratio of 1 to 3, every 4 spoonfuls of mix contain 1 of blue and 3 of white. 18 ÷ 4 = 4.5, so he needs 4.5 spoonfuls of blue and 4.5 × 3 = 13.5 spoonfuls of white. He mixes it all at once: a second batch is almost impossible to match exactly.

6Make it: a tint-and-shade chart

1. On card or thick paper, rule three rows of five boxes, each 3 cm square.
2. Paint the pure primary in the middle box of each row.
3. Mix two tints for the two boxes on the left and two shades for the two boxes on the right. Clean your brush between every mix.
4. Label every box with its mix, for example "red + a little white".
5. When the chart is dry, squint at it or photograph it in black and white. Find two boxes of different hues that have the same value, and mark them with a star.

7Look closely

The Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) painted this Lozenge Composition in 1921 on a square canvas turned to stand on one corner. He used only the three primaries, black, white and grey, in flat areas separated by black lines.

• Squint at it. The yellow triangle almost disappears into the white, the blue triangle is nearly as dark as the black rectangle, and the tiny red corner sits between them. Mondrian balanced large and small areas partly by their values.
• Notice how small the red is. A strong colour can hold its own in a painting even when it covers very little of the surface.

Practice