The bias color wheel

Posted: Feb 01, 2011 |

As you begin to mix colors, sooner or later you encounter (cue sinister music) the ominous mud. Mud is the result when the colors mix up just plain ugly. You can get mud when mixing a neutral color from complements. Or mud can appear when paint is opaque, meaning you can't see through it. Transparent paint allows the viewer to see through the paint. Light bounces through the paint to the white paper and back into your eye so you see glowing colors. You can't see through opaque paint, so the light can't bounce off the paper and no light is reflected. The result can look chalky and dull — like mud.

Mixing complementary colors neutralizes colors, which looks like a graybrown color. Sometimes this is a useful, beautiful color. Mud or neutral? It depends on your intention — but it's important to know how to get what you want or avoid what you don't want.

So why do you sometimes mix colors and get a color that isn't what you hoped it would be? Here is the secret:

Paint pigments are not pure colors. They may have a little bit of another color in them. So when you mix red and blue and hope to get purple, it sometimes comes out brown. Mud. How did that happen? You need to have the correct red and blue. For example, if I mix cadmium red and Prussian blue together, I should get purple, right? Yes, according to what the color wheel says. Instead, I get a muddy brown. Why? Those two colors have a tiny bit of yellow in them. So essentially, I mixed yellow, red, and blue, a formula for neutral gray. Without knowing it, I mixed the wrong blue and red. So it is important to understand which primary colors to mix to achieve secondary colors.

Each color contains a primary color adjacent to it on the color wheel, and that adjacent color is called the bias. The red and blue in my example each had a yellow bias.

So each primary color has two biases:

  • Cadmium red is biased yellow; alizarin crimson is biased blue.
  • Cadmium yellow is biased red; lemon yellow is biased blue.
  • Phthalocyanine blue is biased yellow; ultramarine blue is biased red.

So, you need to have two of each primary color on your painting palette so you can mix colors that have the right bias. Sometimes you have to visually evaluate the color to determine the bias. Compare it and see which color it leans toward to determine bias.

When you mix two primary colors to get a secondary color, use the primaries biased toward each other; for example, use a blue that is biased red (ultramarine blue) and a red that is biased blue (alizarin crimson) to make a nice purple. That way you have only two primary colors involved. Three primary colors mix mud. Say the primary and its bias out loud when mixing. If you mention three primaries, you have mud.

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