Colors via Pigment and Highlighters

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.