Colors via Pigment
and Highlighters
In a bit of a
diversion from the “Studying Feathers” series, I decided to
explore colors. As I wrote in the first part of my “Using Values
and Gradients” series, I have relatively little experience with
color. Now seemed just as good a time as any to delve into the
topic.
I was inspired to
write this post upon looking at the color theory page on Wikipedia.
Specifically, I was interested in the CMYK, subtractive color mixing
diagram. Essentially, all printed colors are made using
different ratios of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink. This goes
a bit against the traditional theory that, to obtain any color, you
must mix red, blue, and yellow. Mixing red, blue, and yellow tends
to produce unsaturated or “muddy” colors, and usually “pure”
pigments — or ones that directly resembled the desired color —
were used instead of the mixtures. Put simply: if you wanted purple,
you were more likely to use a pure purple pigment than a mixture of
red and blue.
Today, we use CMYK
mixtures to obtain all of the colors that we require, because using
such a wide variety of pure pigments is impractical for the purposes
of mass production. This explains why your ink-jet printer
cartridges only use those few, odd colors.
Further delving into
the topic, I found that this also explains those strange circles you
see when looking closely at printed materials — each “channel”
of the CMYK model is offset from each other by a given angle. Each
channel consists of a screen of equally spaced dots aligned in a grid
that, when rotated around a center point, produce circles. This is
perhaps better explained by the diagram on the “Screen Angle”
article on Wikipedia.
Knowing these few
things, I wanted to see if I could — to some extent — replicate
this effect using various traditional coloring media.
Colored Pencils
As you can see, the results were quite underwhelming. The first set
of colored pencils did not have true magenta or cyan pencils. Opting
for the red and blue in their stead provided the muddy colors
expected by the information above. The second set of colored pencils
again did not have magenta or cyan pencils either. It did, however,
have pink and a lighter blue. The results were slightly better —
some mixing can be seen in the overlap, but overall the results were
minimally successful.
This is of course not to say that successful mixing cannot be
achieved with any colored
pencils. Again, I have little experience using colors in my own work. It
also easily demonstrated in
other artists’ works
that a full set
of “true pigment” colored pencils can produce an impressive range
of realistic and vibrant colors. However,
the success of CMYK-only colored pencils is not something that I have
looked into.
Oil
Pastels
Oil
pastels are a distant departure from most of the media that I use.
They are highly saturated and thick when
applied to paper.
In
some ways, I would liken them to a dry form of acrylic paint due to
the purity of the colors they provide.
As
you can probably tell from the mixing of the “CMYK” pastels
(using red instead of magenta, again due to the color not being
present in my set), the
results were surprisingly ineffective. The
mixing was so weak that the colors appeared to overlap more
successfully than combine. Obviously,
pastels are meant to be blended with each other to
form broad ranges of colors, and such a small region of application
was not going to be suited for this purpose.
Therein
lies the reason that there is an ugly, purplish blob next to this
sample. I mixed the red and blue pastels to create a purple base by
smudging them with my fingers and then added black to the bottom in
an attempt to create a gradient. This
again provided the muddy result expected by my research.
Sharpie
Highlighters
I
was running out of materials to test, and each of my results were
rather depressing. Not wanting to give up, though, I tried one last
thing: Highlighters. These,
in particular, were produced by Sharpie and likely not intended for
use in art.
Surprisingly,
they actually
mixed
to produce a fairly wide range of colors.
 |
| The entire combination of colors possible using highlighters. Also known as a "Color Gamut." |
This
entire
range of colors was created using only the highlighters seen above. I have green highlighters, but did not use them to produce
this result.
Each
highlighter had a different range of “intensity” characterized by
how many times it was overlapped with another layer of the same
color. This explains why each range looks rectangular as opposed to
square.
Put
more simply, the yellow sharpie had a range of 2 (or 0-1, for the
more technical
readers).
It was either there or not there, as adding more layers atop the
preexisting yellow did not impact its intensity. The
cyan sharpie had the widest range of 5 (or 0-4) intensities.
And
the magenta sharpie had a range of 4, or (0-3) levels of intensity.
The first range mixes cyan and yellow, the second range mixes magenta
and yellow, the third mixes cyan and magenta, and the fourth mixes
all three (assuming that yellow is present).
As
a result, we have this wonderful mix of nice neon, and “tropical”
colors that would perhaps be expected from the use of highlighters.
Ok,
so this isn’t exactly the kind of color theory most artists are
interested in — what colors look nice next to others, how color
impacts mood, and how lighting
influences colors — but it is an interesting base to the study, as
printed art will necessitate an understanding of the CMYK color
model. Even
if you plan on working digitally, you will likely need to convert
your work to this color model in order for it to look accurate in the
physical world. It
would make an interesting art-challenge as well — to use these
three highlighters and some media for adding value to create a
finished piece of artwork.
And
of course, I just found it a bit interesting, heh.
