Controversial Color Theory: RYB vs CMY Color Wheel - What are the REAL Primary Colors?
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- Опубликовано: 28 май 2024
- Red, blue and yellow, or cyan, yellow and magenta? Which are the REAL primary colors? And which primary color wheel is the best for color mixing and color harmony?
More info on the blog: sarahrenaeclark.com/advanced-...
And check out my previous video about color harmonies and choosing colors that work well together using the traditional color wheel: • COLOR THEORY BASICS: U...
Let’s take a look at the history of the color wheel and try to make sense of this CMY vs RYB color wheel debate once and for all. I’ll try to keep this thorough but as simple as possible, and answer the questions:
- Is the traditional color wheel outdated? Is my art teacher wrong?
- Are there really 3 primary colors that can make every other color?
- What’s the difference between RGB, RYB and CMY?
- Which color wheel is the real color wheel?
- Which color wheel should I use for color mixing?
- Which color wheel should I use to choose color harmonies?
- Why do we even use a color wheel? Can’t we just use all the colors?
- Does magenta really exist?
- And what are IMPOSSIBLE colors and imaginary primaries?
To keep this video as short and simple as possible, I’ve left out some of the extra information that I discovered in my searches, but I’ve included it all in the blog post, along with the sources where I’ve gathered my information, and some extra reading you might enjoy if you want to learn more about color theory for yourself. You can check it all out here: sarahrenaeclark.com/advanced-...
#sarahrenaeclark #colortheory #colorwheel
If you’ve found this video interesting or helpful, please consider sharing it with a friend! I really appreciate it!
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So… what’s your verdict? What caught you by surprise?
I am still in shock that we can make red with magenta and yellow!!
And magenta is red and blue in the correct ratio with red being the dominant color in the mix. There actually is no specific wavelength of light that corresponds to magenta. The whole field of color theory and the primary color wheel is based on the fact that a light souce when shined through a prism and split into its constituent wavelengths. If the red, yellow and blue are then shined through a second prism they will not split into other colors. Its basic physics and optics. Wishing that magenta and cyan are actual primaries will not make it so. But in the world of color mixing yes it is possible to consider them as such and use them. But really you are just using a mix of the true primaries to get the magenta and cyan. Note this is only true for the actual wavelengths of the primary colors. If we take the reddish portion on the spectrum we will wind up with some blue and yellow.
I'll put my virtual soapbox away for now.
I've known this for the longest time
Sorry didn't finish writing my comment
I was always taught with the cmy as primary, this was due to my uncle being an artist for years and between him and my step father being a photographer
They would often argue over it
Sorry 1 more point to add
Although I was taught this from a young age, it actually doesn't mean much to me, I'm slightly colour blind, I don't understand colour at all
I'm an advocate for teaching the CMY colorwheel in school.
It's mostly because here in Germany (where I'm from) we learn the color wheel with watercolor and the teachers tell us to only use red, blue and yellow. Therefore all students always end up with muddy purple. But when you ask the teacher why that is, they always tell you that you have to had made a mistake.
And it discourages a lot of kids from making art, because they think that they can't make it right, when the actual mistake was the color choice from the teacher. It's just heartbreaking to see young children get frustrated about art and often even quit it completely.
Thats not only my experience - every one I talk to about this has the same experience.
I think it’s a shame that some art teachers aren’t aware of the more complex sides of color. I don’t expect kids to be taught CMY in primary school, but it would be beneficial for teachers to at least understand what they are teaching and how/why colors mix the way they do
The way we were taught the RBY colorwheel was also with very specific shades of red and blue. So it wouldn't make a difference changing them to magenta and cyan other that you could mix way more vibrant colors.
Actually she right the problem is she didn't teach you about temperature. Most blues used in school are cool tones while most reds used in school are warm tones. Thus making a muddy purple what you teacher should have done was talk about split palettes on how colors come in more then one tone.
@@jesterparty6947 in my school we used a cool red and warmer blue, so a bit closer to cmy, which broadened the gamut a bit. but greens still turned out yucky. but alas my teacher told me it was my fault for not mixing properly, not because it was impossible to get vivid colours by mixing only three primaries.
It gets worse when society leave untrained hypocritical teachers to teach art. My year 6 teacher (this is in Australia) used this art idea textbook and told everyone in the class to ONLY use two colours JUST like the picture in the textbook (she even pointed at the areas of the picture) but the one kid that was away on that day, came to class the next day, got told to make the artwork and she made it with rainbow colours and the teacher showed it off, as if like what she did was a masterpiece. The teacher was right, it was beautiful BUT, the teacher herself emphasised to everyone that we're only allowed to use TWO colours (just like the text book), so we had our creativity quashed because we're worried about pissing off a psychotic teacher and the one kid who had no idea what happened, she ended up looking like the most creative kid in class LOL.
Another factor that isn't talked so much about is that magenta and cyan are fairly recent colors, coming from the era of synthetic dyes, and even now the very bright ones are only available as dyes (like ink in printers or makers), not pigments (like watercolor, oil and pretty much all other traditional art media). So when historical color theories were created, cyan and magenta weren't actually available.
Yes, and the fact that they don't occur in nature much along with the fact that red and blue came much earlier in language.
@@AllyFin 🐂💩
@@AllyFin look above, the sky is cyan
@@jaakkotahtela123 it's between cyan and blue and that's only one instance
@@AllyFin that is a very large instance. And the color depends on where you are located. Near the equator it’s a deeper blue but the closer you are from the poles the lighter the color. The color also depends on the time of the day. At the blue hour everything can look pretty cyanish if there is snow on the ground
I like to use a split primary palette where you use a warm and cool version of each primary. I have. Notices that cool colors are more transparent and mix with less mud.
That’s another approach that I was thinking of bringing into this video, but I’ll save it for a video specific to color mixing. I like it too, but I haven’t used it much personally!
@@SarahRenaeClark That's something I'd like to learn more about. Hope you can come out with a video soon!!
I was coming to the comment section to say similar.
Agreed. I find that for traditional media, a split primary is definitely the best solution.
Well split primary is exactly like a CMY but with a cool yellow instead of green. And the cool and warm blue. Now, personally, violet blues are cool and cyans are warm but that is a matter of opinion. They’re both cool colors (duh, they’re blues) and when you mix Cyan and magenta, you get a violet blue. This violet blue’s hues can be either French Ultramarine (PB29), Indanthrone Blue (PB60), Ultramarine Violet Blue (PV15 BS), or Cobalt Blue Deep (PB72). Meanwhile, for Cyan, Phthalocyanine Blue Yellow Shade (PB15:3), Phthalocyanine Turquoise (PB16), or Manganese Blue (PB33). Note these are all hue choices, there’s no right or wrong choice. Also, if you mix neutral yellow w/ Cyan or magenta, you get the warmer and cooler versions. Warm Red by Cool Red and Yellow and Cool Blue by Warm Blue + Cool Red (since Turquoise = Tropical Sea and Indigo = Early Night Sky).
Credit: SoulKeever
I am absolutely blown away by the fact, you've managed to make a cohesive and understandable video explaining this enormously complex subject. Just wow.
The thing is, it doesn't have to be this complex. It's complex because most people can't let go of traditional theories and so we're left with conflicting ideas.
If you follow CMY, color mixing is really straightforward
@kayturs sure, it shouldn't be so complex, but it still is, isn't it?
My 4 year old just asked me if white was a primary color. I had to ask Google and immediately became confused by the various color theories and strong opinions (I am not an artist). Thank you for your clear and concise video that pulled me out of this internet quagmire!
That depends on the color system, in the substractive color model (CMY) white is a primary color.
In CMY, the primaries are Cyan, Magenta and Yellow. White is “not” a primary. In fact, white is never a primary color.
my name is glenn *quagmire* and i say giggity giggity giggity giggigigiggiigtytty
Primary colors is a color setup where there you mix to make new colors.
A setup that you choose set up either own youre own or where you buy your paint.
White is technically not a color, so there's your answer right there. It's a shade, much like black, to lighten or darken actual colors/hues. Obviously this is only correct when talking about pigments, light is a whole other discussion.
Think of black and white like the brightness setting on a monitor.
In high school physics, a 3-bladed fan is often used to demonstrate RGB. When each blade is covered with a primary color and the fan is started, you see white light. Which, of course, cannot be duplicated with pigments. Thank you Sir Isaac.
Issue was that from what I observed at least, this stuff was taught in a Physics 2 class, which isn't required, and a lot of folks get deterred from Physics 1 which deals with Kinematics, the stuff like acceleration, forces, energy, friction, etc. As a result, very few decide to continue on to Physics 2 which covers the stuff like electricity, magnetism, and light.
@@keylimepie3143 I think teaching kids about light early on would be a good idea since it's particularly interesting due to the connection to colours. The Physics 2 stuff seem more interesting than the Physics 1 stuff. After all, electricity and magnetism seem like magic. Perhaps that's actually why they teach them later though, they think they're too hard to understand because they seem like magic. But students are also likely to be more interested in them.
Does the education system even consider what students are interested in as a factor? Because if they don't, that's a shame. They need to consider interest as well as difficulty and importance. Boring subject matter can turn students off. Teaching the interesting subject matter first might even make the otherwise boring subject matter more interesting, just because the students will be more interested in the subject.
Theoretically, CMY makes the most sense as subtractive primaries. Cyan only absorbs red light. Magenta only absorbs green light. You mix the two and you get a color that absorbs red and green, and so you're left with blue light reflecting back.
On the other hand, you simply can't make cyan with RYB. Red absorbs green and blue, yellow absorbs blue, blue absorbs red and green. What combination of these can be mixed to absorb only red? If you think about it, it's impossible
That's why in theory CMY works best for subtractive colors. Each color only absorbs one primary color of light, and so it has the most flexibility to construct any ratio of R:G:B
And the color schemes are better too
you can get the same hue as cyan by mixing blue and yellow. it just won't be as saturated so it won't look vivid.
Yes, it is the same thing I thought, but this works best only in the theory (as you said). In real life it is really hard to create perfect pigments that when mixed together block 100% of the white spectrum they receive. Most of the times there are unwanted subcolours that arise when the pigments are mixed that lead to the appearance of dark tints. I'm not able to explain this super well in 3 lines, but there is another super clear and useful video that does this much better than me (ruclips.net/video/5Z417hM-RAA/видео.html).
> "absorbs only red light"
light isn't just made up of red light, green light, and blue light. it's a spectrum.
yellow light, orange light, and red-orange light all exist and would be absorbed at various amounts by the cyan pigment.
two different pigments could appear to be the same exact cyan when under daylight, but then look different to eachother when under a different kind of light-source.
@@JNCressey The point is our eyes only see the world in red, green, and blue and all the other colors are interpreted by our brains.
I remember having to draw a grey rectangle for art theory in woodsculpting school. The catch was we had to do it with a red, a blue and a yellow pencil. It was next to impossible to get it to be actually grey because the pencils weren't CMY. But I still did learn a lot in that class. Nonetheless it's always good to remind oneself about color theory is really helpful to just have that in the back of your head.
Sarah, this is probably the best explanation and summary of color theory I’ve seen. You did a marvelous job of explaining how the main models came about, their strengths and weaknesses, and the science behind it all without getting too technical, but still getting the point across. I was honestly ready to throw out the traditional color wheel altogether, but your points about teaching children (and non-artistically inclined folks) about general color mixing are very well put. I do think, however, that at least cmy should be introduced much earlier than it is, and probably rgb as well.
Thank you. And yes, I agree!
I have used your RBY CMY colour wheel theories with polymer clay and was very impressed with the colour mixes of the CMY mix. Much nicer richer colours opposed to the colour mixes of the RBY wheel.
Color line but it is numbers:1,3,2,3,1,3,2,3,1,3,2,3
I can’t wait to share this with my senior high art students!! It came up one day in class as a bit of an aside and I sort of threw out the idea that RBY aren’t the only “primary colours” and they all looked at me like I had 3 heads LOL.
Colors are just WONDERFUL
Thanks for the comment!
I think trying to limit ourselves to just 3 colors is mostly unnecessary, other than for the initial learning of color theory, mixing or to challenge or skills. Why not use more colors when they are available? I love your final option!
by
I actually teach my kids cyan and magenta along side blue and red because the common way to use these words has you percieving cyan as a light blue, but it isn't and magenta as a light red, but it isn't. Separating them helps you understand how the colors work better.
I have a PhD in astrophysics, and spent four years analysing spectra and identifying specific colours. People putting pink in a rainbow is a guaranteed way to make me fly into an irrationally OTT rage.
Red and yellow, pink and green, purple and orange and blue, I can sing a rainbow! …right?
Interesting. When i was studying astrophysics we looked at the spectrum for hydrogen and i could see 2 lines below 400nm and beyond the normal 4 with one of my eyes, but not the other. The only way i could describe the first line was a violet marroon color. The 2nd one was too faint to guage its color and that was headache inducingly intense to begin with. I believe there is likely more to color behavior on the wave length than we realize. We have harmonics and octaves and such with sound waves perhaps light behaves in the same way and we just cant see the bridge that connects blue back to red as wave length gets smaller, but our brain already has those colors.
@@rytheguy1800, Those would be the ultraviolet parts of hydrogen's spectrum called the Lyman series. The lens of the eye is responsible for filtering out UV light, but the retina can see ultraviolet. I think one of your lenses is letting a bit of UV through.
Ultraviolet would look similar to the hues around magenta because the L-cones have a secondary peak in their sensitivity around ultaviolet, so the UV stimulates S-cones and L-cones more than M-cones.
The artist Claude Monet had a lens removed because of cataracts. The hues in his later paintings are considered to be because of UV vision.
@@JNCressey you've now put the thought in my head to have a lens removed... thank you. Fasinating information
It makes more sense than indigo being in the rainbow.
I said what I said.
🎤⬇️
As an art teacher, I teach traditional rby, cmy and rgb as color models. I can't stand people who discredit the rby model without knowing how it came to be and how it's a valid color model as much as cmy and rgb. No color model is perfect. And each are useable and useful to their own extent.
Also a common problem that most students face is that cyan and magenta pigments and paint are not always readily accessible in stores as compared to red and blue paint.
Yes! I actually found it incredibly hard to track down a proper magenta in multiple mediums, even just for the simple example I wanted to show in this video. Even paints called “magenta” were not a true magenta.
So, by that logic, there should be "CYB color model" too as an additive color model to match the RBY color model.
@@archive2500 it’s a different way of organizing color, so no.
I mean theoretically, CMY makes the most sense as subtractive primaries. Cyan only absorbs red light. Magenta only absorbs green light. You mix the two and you get a color that absorbs red and green, and so you're left with blue light reflecting back.
On the other hand, in theory, you simply can't make cyan with RYB. Red absorbs green and blue, yellow absorbs blue, blue absorbs red and green. What combination of these can be mixed to absorb only red?
That's why in theory CMY work best for subtractive colors. Each color only absorbs one primary color of light, and so we could mix them into "any" combination (again, in theory)
I learned about cmy last year and cannot find any cyan paint
When I paint I use the 8 colors to basically mix all other colors cadmium red med, quin magenta, hansa yellow, lemon yellow, phthalo blue, ultramarine, mars black and titanium white. Basically the RYB and CMY primaries working together. Great video Sarah.
I came up with a similar palette. It includes opaque and transparent pigments. Also ultra+phthlo+white=cyan.
@@psrosemary "phthlo+white=cyan"
phthalo *IS* cyan
Both are shortened forms of 'naphthalocyanine'.
I encourage you to find "Exploring Color" by Nita Leland. She brilliantly demonstrates using different triads to create a variety of colors and moods. This book has been a great inspiration for me.
I do agree that the CMY system has been neglected by educators and remember being very confused when first challenged with the thought that the traditional primaries had faults.
Thanks for putting such an interesting video together.❤
Thank you! I’ll see if I can find it!
Is it a book or video???
@@reneedixonart book
@@rgrdesigns Thanks!!
I haven't seen a mention of the YURMBY wheel in your video or post, which is growing more popular among artists (especially realist painters and fantasy illustrators). It's based on 6 primaries, but you're never trying to mix them all at once. It's used in conjunction with the gamut mask to create atmospheric, more natural looking color palettes. At the center of your gamut is your neutral color, and depending on the shape of your gamut a "neutral" may actually be a warm or a cool color (not a gray) because colors are relative. This way of thinking about color can really shift our art.
I recommend the book "Color and Light" by James Gurney which has taught me more about color in art than any other book or course (and I've taught graphic design so my knowledge of color theory was already pretty solid).
I haven’t actually heard of the YURMBY wheel- but I’ve just looked it up and it looks fantastic! Also like the split-primary palette (which I also didn’t talk about) this looks to use 6 main colors instead of 3, which I think is a much better approach for artists.
I think I’ll do a future video aimed at color mixing and will explore both wheels, as they both offer a far bigger variety of colors than any 3 set of primaries.
Thanks for the recommendations!
On a different note, I don't really see the point of using any 3 primary color system in art. CMYK and RGB are limited because of their industrial use, but there's never a reason to stick with such a limited selection of pigments in art. Just because some color can be mixed, doesn't mean it should.
Teaching kids that you can mix with CMYK? Yeah, let's do that in one lesson and then drop it.
Color harmonies work better based on the 6 color wheel.
Painting palettes limited to any number of "primaries"? Completely unnecessary. Everyone picks their own favorite pigments based on the subject matter they draw or paint.
@@SarahRenaeClark I'm glad, you're very welcome! :)
I was writing my follow up comment at the same time and yes basically I agree that 3 color system is unnecessarily ascetic for art. 6 colors are better for sure, but still it's pretty arbitrary.
When it comes to choosing pigments for a limited palette, I'm following the guideline: "Which colors need to be the most saturated? Get that as a single pigment, mix the rest."
So I don't use lemon yellow at all (primary cool yellow), but I have a really nice green gold watercolor which is a tertiary color in most systems. Also no portrait palette is complete without one brown!
+Nela Dunato exactly! I completely agree! The primaries are helpful to teach kids the basics about how colors work together. Beyond that, let’s not limit ourselves!
‘Magenta is a pigment of our imagination’ 😅😂
The 1st time I came across the primary colour mixing theory problem was when I first replaced my inkjet printer’s colour cartridges...couldn’t understand how magenta, cyan, yellow & black cartridges could produce such realistic coloured prints without any red, yellow & blue!!! Now I have a better idea. Thanks 👍
The Renaissance artist's "basic colors" (as described by Alberti or Leonardo) were not three but four - red, yellow, green and blue. Nickel dioxine yellow (PY153), quinacridone rose (PV19), phthalocyanine blue GS (PB15), phthalocyanine green YS (PG36).
This is just wildly factually incorrect. These are all modern synthetics. For instance, PV19 wasn't even invented until the late 1930s and wasn't commercially available until the late 1950s. While there is some debate and wiggle room as to when the 'renaissance' ended, 1958 is definitely well past *anyone's* definition.
What red pigments available during the renaissance? It's a pretty short list.
Madder Root (AKA Alizarin Crimson).
Red Lead Oxide.
Cinnabar (AKA Vermilion).
Carmine.
Red earths such as red ochre and burnt sienna.
Additionally, a few very fugitive lakes may have been used. Marble dust dyed with boiled red onion skins for example.
Good discussion of a complex topic. As both a traditional artist and someone who has a degree in photographic technology, I am annoyed that this discussion doesn't come up more. I shifted myself to cmy ages ago because of how we worked in the darkroom on color photography correction. But even I recognize that it isn't a perfect system and some flexibility is involved. I just wish more elementary school teachers would start exposing their kids to the various systems and elements. I have had some good lively discussions with the art teacher on our campus. 😉
My favouite book on colour was Blue and Yellow Don’t Make Green. My favourite way to may greens with paint was with black and yellow.
You are my new HERO! This is the best explanation of the color wheel debate I've heard. I taught a class recently and I stressed "That's why it's called Theory!" None are "wrong."
Admittedly, I found myself more confused when I first started down this rabbit hole, but I found it so interesting I couldn’t help myself! I’m glad I was able to make it simpler for everyone else (I hope!) and bring a different perspective to the topic.
Jewel: please don’t do that again, at least not without understanding, and explaining to your students, the huge difference between the scientific meaning of a “theory” and the everyday, colloquial meaning. (A scientific “theory” is something with a near-complete degree of certainty. The colloquial meaning of a theory as “something I think might be the case but I’m not sure” is more like a “hypothesis” in science.)
As a former journalist/sub-editor working in print media, my colour choices are heavily influenced by the CMYK colour theory, although I also believe that Sir isaac Newton's (light prism theory) Colour Wheel is a very useful tool for beginner colourists to see "how" colours work in harmonies etc.
ETA: Trying to remember what I was taught in art at secondary school, pretty sure we did do work using both the RYB colour wheel and the CMY one though back in the 1980s in the UK.
I've learned the CMYK years ago, but as a personal stylist and image consultant I had to "unlearn" (most) of the CMY system since it doesn't totally work for this field, and traditional RBY works the best for analizing people's skin color, undertone and their best colors
Need to add that my work consists on analizing the content/ balance of primary colors within any color, especially neutrals (brown, beige, even grey). It's not about colors themselves or painting nor creating/mixing colors
Interesting!
many artists these days recommend six primaries, warm and cool varieties of R, Y and B, in addition to black and white.
how you divide colours is partly perceptual, partly cultural. in Greece, they don't call the sky blue, they call it galazio = azure. while they have a specific word for orange, they usually classify shades of orange as either red or yellow. they call mauve anything between violet and magenta.
Yes I was going to mention the idea of six primaries, warm and cool varieties of R, Y and B, in addition to black and white... in paint, to yield a wider variety of mixed colours.
I love this video. As someone with over 3 decades in graphic design, printing, print-making, video editing, and computer graphics, I REALLY enjoyed your presentation. I taught color theory using CMYK in several universities, and it was met initially with skepticism by the students, until they started using it with real paint, and then they understood...
the markers shelf on the wall behind you is so satisfying!
very interesting video:)
My teacher in my university in 5 hours was not able to teach me half of what you did in this 17 min video. Super useful! Thanks :D
Even though I'm someone who adores the cmy color wheel and have my beef with the ryb wheel, I think it wouldn't be a bad idea to teach both to students. But instead of it being the idea of "RYB for children, CMY for teens and up", it could instead be explained as "If you don't have access to Cyan and Magenta, Blue and Red is alternate option" since cyan and magenta are harder to find in certain mediums. Of course, there's more nuance than that to color, but honestly I think it'd be easier for kids to grasp color theory and colors in general if they were taught this from the start.
Wonderful video!
All I can say is WOW! This is the most informative explanation of Color I’ve ever heard. I’m blown away. Thank you. I’m just getting started with colored pencil and I really love your videos. Keep making them.
This is really useful info for a relative novice of a painter like me! Thanks. Look forward to checking out your blog.
Reading about the Munsell system was the start of a better understanding for me. The 'handprint' web site was also very useful.
Dang that got deep. Recent subscriber, and I’ve been binge-watching all your videos! Thanks for being such an inspiration!
This was very interesting & your presentation was understandable & engaging. Thanks
There are more various hues that can be used to describe cyan. Cyan can be either closer to green or closer to blue. It can be used to describe any blue-green color like turquoise, teal, aqua, etc. There is also a wide range of colors used to describe Magenta. It can either be closer to reddish-pink or it can be closer to purple. I still believe kids should be taught the difference between cyan and blue. They are quite different from each other.
Yeah! Between Green and Cyan is Spring Green and between Cyan and Blue is Azure, both of these colors are tertiary colors and are separate distinct colors that has many shades, tones and tints!
@@Fb_Sim_Spring_Friend Well with yellow, you could have a goldish yellow and a lemon yellow. There isn't just one specific hue of yellow. Yes, yellow-green/lime green is different than plain old yellow, but yellow could have a tiny bit of green in it and still be considered yellow. Cyan can also have a little bit of green in it and still be considered cyan. It could also have a tab bit of blue in it and still be considered cyan. There is a difference between additive cyan and subtractive cyan. Subtractive cyan is a bit more blueish and one could say additive cyan could be a bit more greenish. Ideally additive cyan is pure cyan, with equal amounts of green and blue light. However, the cyan that the printer uses tends to be more blueish than additive cyan. All around cyan can be used to describe different colors other than one specific hue. Just like there is not one specific yellow.
@@user-zq7dk4fk2y Mhm! There are many shades of cyan very distinct to each other as the "blue-green" colors like... Teal, turquoise, celeste, blue-green, caribbean current, dark cyan, electric blue, keppel, light cyan, light sea green, midnight green, moonstone, myrtle green, peacock blue, robin egg blue, skobeloff, sky blue, tiffany blue, verdigris and many more! Many family of cyans!
@@Fb_Sim_Spring_Friend that is basically what I was trying to say.
@@Fb_Sim_Spring_Friend I would say that while a lot of those have blue in the name, they aren't actually blue or green. As my art teacher put it, there are an infant amount of colors it might seem. So people come up with bizarre names for them. She said the term fashion names. Chartreuse, cerulean-blue, maurve, those are all fashion names for colors. Since children are not taught about cyan in school, they just call it blue. While they might call it shades of blue or green, it's still cyan. You could take a red crayon and call it whatever you want. You could call it scarlet, candy apple, rudy, poppy, or whatever. It's still red no matter what you call it. You could call it pretty purple and it would still be red. Cyan and its different hues are still cyan regardless of what you call it. Companies like Crayola will do the same thing with fashion names. I had a robin's-egg-blue crayon from Crayola. It had way too much green to be considered blue even though it had blue in the name. True blue mixed with red makes a dark purple. Cyan mixed with red makes brown or some ugly color. Sometimes an ugly brownish green. If I took that robin's-egg-blue and mixed it with a red, it would still produce a muddy color because the robin's-egg-blue was still cyan even if Crayola named it blue. I did mix the crayon with red and it produced an ugly muddy brownish green color. There is still a wide range of cyan colors even if they have fashion names containing blue.
Thanks for the enlightening and educational tutorial that also made me smile re: math and color. As a newbie watercolor artist, I am struggling with color wheels and the whole RYB, CMY business but your video cleared up so much and actually allowed me to breathe a little easier. Color in itself is so life affirming so let's just embrace it all. 🙂
This video pulled so much together for me - thanks! New subscriber 😁
You're good! Really really good! Love it all: voice inflection, fast pace, know your content, Great visuals, etc. etc. Best I have ever seen and helps this color luddite better understand. Thank you, thank you!
Thank you so much for explaining this! I am a passionate passionate lover of color and I have been told by artists that I really understand colors and know how to work them. The truth is, I don't even know how to use a color wheel beyond the very very basics!! I need to push myself further to improve my art and RUclips videos have been assisting me a great deal, including yours!
Thank you so much for captioning your videos!
Holy freaking cow! Happened upon this video when as a relative newbie the sliders in Photoshop started getting to me and RUclips's suggestions on "color theory" landed me here. I know I'm late to this particular party, but already subscribed for the education and entertainment so beautifully blended. Thanks for helping me getting gears unstuck.
And for a total (and completely platonic) tangent, you have very striking eyes.
Thanks for getting me unstuck and cheers!
It's funny, I've been meaning to do my own thread on Twitter about color mixing, and knew I'd run into additive and subtractive mixing fast, and the whole thing just gives me a headache. I don't know if you've run into Kids These Days (TM) calling cyan, magenta, and yellow the "modern" primaries, but they are. The explanation seems to be 'because that's what's in the printer' and I kind of hold my head and think "no..." but I don't open the can of worms.
Add in I'm a history nerd who's studied the history of pigments. I feel that's a huge factor with all this; until the last hundred-odd years we haven't even had these colors to play with, to form the argument. Let alone the light-based media from televisions forward that begin the - additive? subtractive? I CAN NEVER REMEMBER - discussion. And did I mention, I paint? And love brights, so the CMYK palette is much more my speed, even though I know traditionally it wouldn't even exist.
I would give a LOT of money to see what VanGogh would have done with modern paint.
You did a great job on a bonkers topic. If you want to make your head swim further, look into tetrachromacy; we now have genetic documentation that yes, some women really do see more colors.
Bonkers. The whole thing is utterly bonkers. You did great. Sorry for the screed. Have a nice night.
It’s definitely a can of worms! And I just stayed on the surface. I had to stop myself going deeper because it just got more complicated, very quickly! Too much for a short video 😬
The basic issue is: how our eyes see color. Then adding what the color is made of and that influence. What alters the entire scope is 1) every eye is different, 2) light & chemicals vary in behavior. Understanding and education is essential to understanding all the possibilities. It's not an EASY answer. And it's SILLY to pick one over another. It's the entire gamut of possibilities available that is exciting.
This might just be the best video on this subject! I thought I knew most of it already but I learned a lot! 😊
Color theory and color wheels are tricky, just the other day i started searching google for color information, warm/cool tones, because i want to learn how to mix my colors better, knowing what blue i should mix with what yellow to get green etc. funny this video would pop up just now because i was like "what are all of these strange color wheels, where are the real ones" when trying to find the information, turns out I've just lived under a rock since i left school xD
Great video. I personally didn’t understand the cyan, magenta, yellow theory until a couple of years ago. Getting a better understanding will help me grow as an artist. Just happy I have a large array of colored pencils. I did a color wheel with three colors and made my secondary and tertiary colors with the three pencils. Yes it’s doable and helped me understand color theory. Do I want to purchase a few colors and mix them for everything I color? A big no!
I love this video! I'm now trying to make a mixing chart with my Faber Castells using the CMYK wheel.
wow, one of the best videos on color theory and colors wheels i have ever found :) thank you so much. i learned soooo much
This video is awesome! I love how you broke this down and provided an objective and constructive way to understand.
This is the most interesting, and educational video I have read in months. Thank you Sarah :)
Thank you!
I learned RBY in high school and I've had so many issues now trying to pick up paint as a hobby. Specifically not being able to get good pinks.
I wrote that about pink before the video started and felt so validated!
BY FAR the best video i've seen on this topic
I use cyan magenta red blue and yellow to mix colors I need with out thinking i got lucky and an art teacher taught me early on that cyan and magenta some times created better colors. He was amazing. He also helped me discover that. Using more then 1 color wheel at the same time was okay too
Thank you so much for this video! Still confused in all this color world but you already helped me a lot!
Has everyone forgotten that default "blue" is now a different colour than when the RYB model was designed? What Newton designated as "blue" is what we now call "light blue" or "cyan". What we now call "blue" is what Newton called "indigo" (or "dark blue"). This is why the spectrum has "... green, blue, indigo, violet". If we used out current definitions, the spectrum would be "... green, cyan, blue, violet". Indigo is not some sort of bluish-purpley-violet, it's just plain old "dark blue", or - in our current terminology - "blue".
When we remember that Newton's blue is our cyan, his RYB model becomes our RYC. Much better greens, and a closer match to magenta. Newton would have thought of our RYB model as R-Y-indigo. He would probably be a bit bemused.
I think you’re right. I discovered the same when looking into his original wheel. A cyan blue is much better for mixing! I naturally tend to lean towards a lighter rather than darker blue when using something for mixing colors, even when using the RYB model. It just FEELS right.
Yep! What I’m surprised didn’t make it into the video is the fact that the names of unspecific colors (by which I mean _families_ of colors, like “red” or “blue”) are actually not uniform across languages and cultures, which alone should make clear that they’re shaky foundations for color models. Historically speaking, blue was less likely to be considered its own color, with blues often being considered shades of green. The hypothesis is that color families that were not common were less likely to get their own family name. Why have a “blue” color family when in your environment, it only exists in the sky and deep, clear water? So they’d lump it in with green, and say something like “sky green” or “water color”. In contrast, since flowers and berries and animals, etc. often contain reds and pinks, red is the first color family to be named, after “dark” and “light”.
In modern times, all languages in highly developed societies have names for similar sets of basic color families, presumably due to ongoing cultural exchange, trade, etc, but isolated tribal languages often still do not!
A great video on the subject, might be, which wheels to use with which medium, whilst demonstrating which said medium. You could even link it to some of your products or books. Love the videos.
Thank you so much for explaining this simply; I was just so confused about everything before
Thanks Sarah, this was SO helpful! I've always followed the RYB colorwheel, but I was never really pleased with the results of mixing. And I just realized that the CMY colorwheel exists, and I think that it is going to solve all of my problems. But I haven't tried it yet, this is just what I think...
Nice tutorial my friend..very useful for my art 🖼. Thank you for sharing.
Excellent video, with excellent final word and recomendation. It's all about perception, experiment, use all. Great advice.
Oh! A topic close to my heart! I love having the knowledge of both CMY and RBY because it helps me mix a full range of colours from bright, clear and candy-like to muted and moody. I can't really express my consternation when I came from working with fabric to mixing watercolours and my knowledge of RBY colour theory DIDN'T WORK! I was horrified at the "purple" I was able to mix and wasn't happy with the green either. Now I like to have a warm and cool of each "primary" which covers all the RBY, CMY bases and is very versatile for mixing. That, along with mixing complements to get muted colours makes me happy. May I share a pet peeve? It's hearing the phrase, "don't mix X with Y; you will make mud." For one thing it's overused and trite and for another, we need a lot of muddy colours to paint our world, so it's a pretty limiting comment, in my grumpy opinion. Anyway. It's amazing to me how rapidly the theoretical framework gets super confusing and muddy. Just glad there are a few things to cling to that make sense!
I agree that the sky is not just blue, but I don't think it's cyan. To me it's azure, my favorite color. There's a reason my name begins with Azure.
I largely agree with what she has to say. I would say that at the high school and college level, magenta and cyan should be taught, and that CMY should definitely be a major part of any art degree, or graphic design degree, or what have you, and I think that to a large degree it's not.
Interestingly enough I encountered learning about RGB and CMY in high school, but it was from a Physics 2 class. Problem was that physics 2 isn't required, and a lot of folks get deterred after Physics 1, due to how math intensive kinematics can be, ya know, dealing with acceleration, forces, energy, friction, etc. So very few decided to continue on to Physics 2 which covers electricity, magnetism, and light n stuff of that sort. I also loosely came across RGB and CMY in a graphic design class in high school, but once again, it was an elective and not required, and it wasn't so much discussed but more so an observation when using Photoshop.
When I went to art school we used gauche to create our color wheel for our design classes. Using the RYB Color wheel. We had to make shades and tints too. It was pretty challenging but fun. I learned about cmyk in my Graphic design classes. In our painting classes which used oil paints we used a typical colors like raw sienna, brunt umber etc to make our colors.
Nicely done. I believe that students of all ages will benefit from this information about colour. In turn, people can make individual, informed decisions about colour use.
I absolutely loved this video! Is so amazing and educational. I was actually taught CMY at school like 20 years ago back in Spain, but I do recognize RYB as primaries and I loved to see the bigger picture on this video
That was great. Thanks so much for your work and the clear explaination. Great job.
Very nicely explained. Enjoyed a lot seeing this video. Thank you very much for providing such a good information. God Bless You.
Awesome video explaining the debate. Thanks.
Oh My! Thank You for explaining in so much detail. I gained so much from this video!
Fascinating! Always wondered about printer colors vs the "standard" RBY
Thanks for illustrating these theories!💞
I think "sky color" varies, and often includes cyan, but sometimes here in the New Mexico high dessert on a late summer afternoon, the sky is definitely a deeper blue than cyan. :)
Wouldn't that'd be Azure? Since it's between Cyan and Blue...
This might be a country thing, but we definitely learned CMY in art class and RBY in physics in middle school, and this was a good 15 years ago
the imaginary colour system actually does exist
It's all to do with with the amount of cones in your eye, these cones is sensitive to light and colour
Certain animals for instance have more cones so see more colours and even different light Rays but others like ferrets only see in red or only black and white and pixelated
The Mantis shrimp!
so we have to 'imagine' the pigments using maths.
@@JimmothyGibbons yup math, concepts, and most of all Humility that we are not perfect specimens
Biological eyes, no matter what kind, do not have pixels and cannot see “pixelated”. There are differences in visual acuity (resolution), but it’s not pixels. The same goes for photographic film: it has grain, but not pixels.
CMY always looks fresh to me. It gives me a light, happy feeling. Barbie Dreamhouse Adventures is very big on CMY.
Thanks so much for this video...I learned so much...glad I found your channel...subscribed to enjoy more!!!
Thank you!
Very well spoken!
I come from a music background which also has theories and wheels and as a musician you learn to link it all, sharps, flats, letters, and kinds (natural, blues, harmonic, etc).
also as a Kid I learned that mixing colors of light gets you a different result from mixing colors of paint.
all this together and I'm boggled why someone would saythere is 1 color wheel, and you are using the wrong one.
Thanks Sarah, this is excellent!!
Going to school in the UK during the 70's and 80's, we were only ever taught RGB as the primary colours.
As someone in the newspaper field, CMYK (k is black) is the best. All newspapers use those four colors. And yes the paper is tinted, but the color is still bright enough to get you to buy a copy.
Yes, as Sarah explained, CMY will produce a broader range of brighter colours, however printing inks (as used in newspapers) do mix a little differently to artists' paints. I both paint and design and have long wondered why.
Yes, except for the muddy blues you get from CMY(K) traditional printing. I guess everyone has gotten used to living with muted approximations of blue in the printing world.
Thanks for the explanation. Now I know why my printer's ink colours are CMYK! I thought they were just being fancy with names for RGB... who knew...
Huh. I didn't even realize that I've always used the CMY version because I noticed that the magenta and cyan made a prettier purple. Yeah and come to think of it, all the secondary colors are prettier in my opinion. Anyway, thanks for all the info!
Thank you for this video its so informational👏 i accidentally learned about the cmy when I went a engineer program (they talked about computer screens and printing) before I dropped of and started art school haha and I was surprised they never mentioned it in my art college 🧐
Sarah, this is great. We can argue all day as artists, however the points you make are valid because the public/non-artists need to understand even more than artists…thank you! Jimm Artist
Great video! This was linked in a recent Kristy Rice offering. I saw the CMY wheel in a watercolor book decades ago. Often magenta (like Opera) is not lightfast. Your talents and time are really appreciated. BTW, love the Aussie shows like "Jack Irish", "My Life is Murder" and many others.
The lightfast discussion is something I didn’t really know much about when I made this video, but it’s probably the biggest reason why modern painters haven’t fully moved to CMY. Magenta and cyan aren’t as lightfast as many of the traditional colors, so mixing every other color with them would be a bad idea for the longievity of the art!
Rby frustrated me so much as a kid. It wasnt until i started working in printing that i tried cmy with paint, it was exciting! I now have a travel watercolour palette with only 6 colours (colours close to cmy, burnt umber, raw sienna, black, leaf green) in it and i can mix a WILD number from that. My at home palette has a wild number because i like collecting things ☺️ and its easier to be consistent using manufactured colour.
Im fully on team "different colour wheels and theories for different purposes and mediums". Even down to when im mixing a colour im using a different thought process to when i chose that colour and how it sits against others. I sincerely think its important to learn at least about cmy, rgb, and ryb by the end of primary school.
So interesting!
I bumped into these controverses when I started to understand the process of proper mixing colours in watercolours. According to my prefferencies I put together my limited palete of 8 colours (in my travelling tin I don´t have space for more pans :-) So my version no. 2 is White Nights full pans: yellow (PY150), blue (PB15 - middle phthalo blue), turguoise (PB28), green (PG8), magenta (PR122), orange (PO64), raw sienna (PBr7) and burnt umber (PBr7). In version no. 1 I had ruby red (PR170) - really beautifull, but oranges with PY150 weren´t as bright as I wanted. That´s why I replaced it with orange PO64 for variety of oranges. End yes, I am able to mix red hue similar to ruby red PR170.
Maybe this will be helpful for someone.
Very informative. Thanks for sharing!
Wow, fascinating, I'm new to colour theories so I've definitely made mistakes along the way in my card making.
Having worked in the domestic lighting industry I have understanding of light wavelengths so I actually understand what you are saying in terms of the science.
I'm definitely now going to look on your blog and research more. Thank you for sharing.
Incredible video! Thank you.
This just blew my mind! I don't remember being taught about colours in primary school, but in my Art classes in Portuguese middle school (year 5, we were 10 years old), we were specifically taught Magenta-Cyan-Yellow. Those were the primaries we used throughout the school system. I'm sure we were also taught about light, because I remember we had to make a paper windmill with the primary colours and then blow on it to see how the colours mixed and were perceived. That was in the 1980s, by the way.
It is so heartbreaking to teach English colours and do the supposedly fun "Colour Maths" only to have the kids complain they can't mix the right colours. I usually tell them to use light blue and bright pink to avoid the disappointment (because magenta is NOT red), but now I've been reminded of the science behind it, maybe I'll ask the kids to make a paper windmill... and teach them magenta (which is the same word as in Portuguese) and sky blue for cyan.
I've been trying to use the color wheel more in my art. I've seen this video in my feed but was hesitant to watch before i had a decent grasp of what exactly the color wheel even is. I have zero training in art. I had no idea! This video was very informative and has given me some ideas. Whenever i saw the Imaginary Colors i said to myself, oh crap, she's gonna talk about math 🤣 and i can just hear my Algebra professor now "see, math IS everywhere" Dang it. 🙂
Nicely done Sarah 😃👍🏻✌🏼
One thing about using color groups to teach children is that Cyan and Magenta are and should also be separate color groups rather than thinking of them as specific hues. That would help break apart the category of "blue" which is otherwise very massive compared to other groups because it's sort of absorbed the range of colors around Cyan, and having Magenta can help add more clarity between what colors are very bright and vibrant "pinks" vs actual light, rosy pinks that are lighter tints of different reds. It would also help teach future generations that Cyan and Magenta are important colors worth recognizes as different than a different shade of Red or Blue.
Really nice video Sarah! Thank you for share your thoughts and research about it. There are some tools similar to Adobe Color where we can use a RYB wheel to create color pallets and find combinations?
Very informative and interesting.👍👍