Yellow + Black = Green?
More often than not…it’s true. This is one of those color mixing anomalies that painters come across early on and incorporate into their “bag of tricks.” Many landscape painters have used this pairing to create natural looking greens with a limited palette. It’s quite effective.
Recently I responded to a painter about this phenomenon, and he urged me to share this info with a larger audience. So, Monsieur Bart in France, here it goes…
First, let’s not blame Black. It’s not Black’s fault. Let’s look at Yellow and add a little color science into the conversation.
The color wheel is generally presented, graphically, where each hue family (or piece of the pie) is the same size. This simplifies color theory a bit for communication.
But, if we look at the spectrum of visible light, we see Yellow and Orange, are really quite narrow compared to, say, Red and Green:
So, when we take this into consideration, the color wheel may look like:
In this revised diagram, we see how little the Yellow slice is compared to Green and Red, so it is easy for yellow to get “pushed” into other hue families in color mixing. When we take into account that black pigments tend to shift cool in their tints and mixtures, we can begin to understand how yellow is “pushed” into the green hue family.
Here is our Hansa Yellow Light (a cool yellow) mixed with Chromatic Black, Ivory Black, Van Dyke Brown, and Manganese Violet:
As you can see, the two blacks “push” yellow into the green hue, and to a slightly lesser extent, so does the warm Van Dyke Brown. The warm Manganese violet has enough red in it to “push” the yellow into the orange category.
So, in the end maybe we should have a bit of sympathy for Yellow…always being pushed around…
Isn’t color mixing great?
Scott Gellatly
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