So Much Color Bias

Have you ever tried to mix a color that seemed really straightforward, like mixing blue and yellow to make a nice green or blue and red to make a nice purple but it came out a bit muddy? It happens a lot with pigment-based art materials and the reason for this is something called color bias. Sounds kind of scientific, maybe even intimidating but it’s actually a very simple concept. Simple but exceedingly important. It may even be the most important concept to understand when it comes to mixing pigment-based art mediums.

So, what is color bias? It is a characteristic seen in a not quite exact hue that tells us what other hue it leans towards. In other words, you can call a particular color a yellow but if it is not a true yellow, the color bias characteristic identifies whether that yellow has a touch of cyan in it or a touch of magenta, because if it’s not just yellow then it’s going to have at least a touch of another primary, leading it away from that true yellow hue point on the color wheel.

It’s not too difficult to identify color bias, especially if you have a color wheel at hand. For example, a lot of people think turquoise is basically a cyan. It’s close but isn’t quite cyan. Look at a CMY color wheel and this example of the color turquoise. Do you think this turquoise has a touch more yellow or a touch more magenta than a true cyan? An easier way to determine this is to see if it’s closer to blue or closer to green on the color wheel. It should be pretty obvious that it leans closer to green. And green has cyan and yellow in it, right? Therefore, the turquoise must have a touch of yellow in it to make it lean towards green. The direction that it leans is its color bias.

Although it is important to realize which primary a color is leaning towards, since it’s easier to identify something that’s only a couple spots away on a 12 hue color wheel, identifying the bias of the primary color is usually described in terms of how close it is to the next secondary color. So, we would say that the turquoise is a cyan with a green color bias. Here’s a visual chart of color bias in colors that we would, on their own, name simply as yellow, magenta, are cyan, but the ones on the inner side of the circle are not true primary colors.

You can talk in terms of color bias with other hues besides primaries, but when it comes to color mixing, the concept is most important for your selection of primary colors that you choose to mix from. However, when we get to talking about identifying complex colors in order to mix them, (which I plan to get going on next week), determining the bias of secondaries becomes pretty essential. In other words, you can say a red has a yellow or magenta bias, but at that point you are identifying which of the primaries are dominant rather than thinking about which ones are added in since red has both yellow and magenta in it already.

 

Leaning on Color Bias for color mixing

Now why is this important? It takes us back to when you try to mix a color and it comes out a bit muddier than you expected or hoped. The reason is almost always due to one of your colors you were mixing with having an unfavorable color bias.

To explain that, I need you to think back to last week when we talked about toning down colors with complementary colors but, as I mentioned then, it didn’t always have to be its exact opposite, as long is that additional color added whatever primary was missing so that the resulting color actually had a little bit of all three primaries in it. In pigments, three primaries together make some version of a mud color so toning down is a way of making a color a tiny bit (or quite a bit) muddy.

Notice how the word mud is used to describe the combination of three primaries and also is typically the word used to describe a color mix that doesn’t come out as bright as you’d hoped? Well, it’s no coincidence. These two things are identifying the same concept. In both cases, the result is a color that includes some portion of all three primaries.

Let’s say you want to mix a nice, bright violet. Being quite comfortable with your CMY color basis, you optimistically grab a chunk of fully saturated magenta and a good pinch of a cyan and confidently mix them up, expecting a beautifully saturated violet. When it comes out looking like mauve and no adjustments to the proportions of the two colors get you your violet, you can absolutely conclude that one or both of the two primary colors you mixed with have a bias leaning towards the one missing primary – yellow.

At this point, you hold up your magenta to your color wheel and see if it leans more towards red or more towards blue. If it seems a true magenta or leans towards blue then it has no yellow in it and would not be the culprit. However, let’s say you conclude your magenta leans towards red. Sigh. Red trots away from magenta on the color wheel towards yellow so it has yellow in it.

But don’t conclude that it was just the magenta that was the problem. Pick up your cyan and see if it leans more towards green or more towards blue. If your cyan is looking a bit more like our notorious turquoise, meaning it has a green bias and therefore has a bit of yellow in it, you’ll know the yellow that toned down your planned violet color mix came from both of what you thought were true primaries.

This is extremely common in pigment-based mediums as it is very hard to create a true primary so you can just assume that most of the primary colors you choose in your art mediums will have a bias. Now, don’t think that means you are doomed to dull colors all the time. You’re not at all! Knowing this simply gives you back control. That turquoise, even though it is not a true cyan but a cyan with a green bias, will mix beautifully saturated greens with a yellow that itself has a green bias.

Plus, toning down colors is not at all a bad thing, not if that is what you are after. Colors that are toned down a bit tend to come across as more sophisticated and far more natural looking, as you can see in this pretty palette here. Now that you are aware of color bias, you can intentionally choose to mix a color from two primaries, one with the bias that leans towards the missing primary, and create a rich, but very slightly toned down color.

Understanding and identifying color bias will allow you to better anticipate the outcomes of your color mixes. It’s you taking color control!

Now, color bias does not help identify other things that desaturate a color, such as a tint (the addition of white) and shade (the addition of black) or toning resulting from the addition of gray (the addition of black and white) but were not going to go there quite yet. This idea of color bias is so important that it is the only thing I’m focusing on this week.

 

Name That Color Bias

So, I’m going to suggest that you focus on your color bias education the rest of the week and just simply ask yourself what the color bias is in any color you see that you like that you are inspired by, that you want to use in your studio, or even in your attire or home decorations. And you can do this with any color. Just identify the color as a primary or a secondary then ask yourself which way it is leaning.

In fact, look at the tertiary colors on your color wheel. Many of them have an easily identified color bias primarily because their bias is in their name. Look at yellow-green for instance. If someone showed you a shirt that color, what would you call it? You’d probably just call it green. And yes, it is green with a yellow color bias.

So do the same kind of thing with any color you come across. If the color pops in between two of our 12 color wheel colors, just pick the primary or secondary color in that pair of colors you feel it would be wedge between and name it that color with its color bias. For instance, if you found a color that lands right between violet and blue on the CMY color wheel, call it blue (a secondary color) with a magenta bias.

If the colors you are trying to identify are heavily toned down or seem to be tinted or shaded, if you have the Color Wheel Company’s CMY wheel turned over and use the shade and tint samples to find the hue on the color wheel.

For instance, the key hue of a peach color might be hard to identify until you look at the tinted versions of orange and red. The tinted oranges look a bit peachy but not quite. It certainly doesn’t lean towards the tinted yellows but it looks a touch like the tinted reds so it’s key hue land somewhere between orange and red. In this case, we will call it a red with a yellow bias. Or you can you call it an orange with a red bias since, in a lot of our minds, orange is a secondary (from our previous RYB view of color) even though it is not on the CMY wheel.

It is not so important that you identify things according to them being primary or secondary – that’s just to keep it simple for you right now. It’s far more important that you train your eye to see that colors tend not to conveniently fall into just one of those 12 identified hues on the color wheel.

So, grab your color wheel or print one out and take it around the house or studio with you and start working on your bias. The good colorful kind!

 

A Bunch of Notes

That was really the whole the lesson but there are some things that I want to bring up in case that conversation presented you wtih up some questions or difficulties. These won’t be of concern to you all but there are some interesting tidbits that others might find of interest as well.

Color Deficiencies

I hate to think of anyone being frustrated trying to learn colors. Up to this point we’ve been dealing with some pretty straightforward color concepts but color bias, a simple concept as it really is, it can be very difficult for people who have any level of color deficiency (also referred to, in its extreme, as color blindness.)

So, if you find you are having a lot of difficulty identifying color bias, you may want to see if you have any sight issues with color. There are tests online like this one that can give you an idea if this is an issue:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/are-you-actually-color-blind

If you find you have any issues, speak to an optometrist. There are some corrective lenses that can help some people or they may think there is an underlying condition that, once treated, may reduce the issue, or keep it from getting worse.

Don’t worry if you have some color sight issues. You can, of course, still make art. Some really big artists have been color blind. Claude Monet, of all people, was colorblind later in life! He had to label all his paints to know what to use. Luckily, our art materials come labeled these days!

What’s about Warm and Cool for Color Mixing?

If you have had color training before, you may have heard of these leanings I’ve talked about this week as warm or cool versions of primary and secondary colors. That is the traditional terminology but I always found that so confusing so I teach it using the other name for it – color bias. However, if you’ve already learned color bias in terms of warm and cool, I’m not going to dissuade you of its usefulness but keep in mind that in my teaching of color concepts and color mixing, I will reserve the talk of warm and cool for choosing color palettes.

About Your Choice of Color Primaries

Throughout these articles I refer to CMY as the color basis for the primary colors we work with mostly because it would be far too confusing to include both CMY and RYB in these conversations even though I promised you could continue to use RYB. And you still can.

Now, if you want to stick with RYB (red, yellow, blue) that, by the definition of primaries, will be saying that red and blue cannot be mixed from other colors. But if you are going to work with CMY, then cyan and magenta are primaries instead which would mean that cyan and magenta can’t be mixed from other colors. How can it be possible that red and blue as well as cyan and magenta can be considered primaries which are defined as hues that can’t be mixed from other colors? Are there really five primary colors? Or is the definition wrong?

Ack! How confusing!

Strangely enough, the definition is not incorrect and you can’t work with five primary colors. You will always need to work with only three. I know. It doesn’t seem right.

The fact is, either set can work but one tends to work better than the other especially with certain materials. With natural pigments, RYB may actually work better primarily because most lines of paint colors were developed to support RYB. The reason this happened is that, back in the day, when all pigments were taken from nature, there were not really any natural pigments that were pure enough to show what the purest hues actually were. They came close with particular versions of red, yellow, and blue. Modern-day chemistry now provides us with a pure cyan and magenta that allows us to work with pigments based on the science of light and color which is why I encourage CMY as the color basis from which you work. However, tradition has led makers of conventional artist’s mediums to create colors based on the older, classic pigment paints although some of that is starting to change and you can find versions of cyan and magenta in usually at least one line of a particular artist medium.

Understanding this and the conversation we just had about color bias, I think it becomes rather apparent that CYM mixes will give you the best options for brighter colors plus better color mixing control, even when making toned down and neutral colors. But if you want to stick with RYB – just think red instead of magenta and blue instead of cyan and then work off of a RYB color wheel. Otherwise, the concepts were pretty much the same.

 

Where are all the Pics?

Okay, I have to run. I apologize that there aren’t nearly so many pieces of art as examples this week. It’s been a difficult week for my family and getting work done was not always my priority. In have two very close family members that are having particularly difficult health battles, one which got quite bad this week. We remain optimistic but it has been rough.

Neither of these loved one’s health issues are directly related to this pandemic, but the complications of trying to ensure they don’t get sick is certainly not helpful. This is part of the reason I’ve been asking that people think about wearing masks as signs of caring. When you have someone – or several someones – that you love who you know are almost certain to die if they catch this virus, the wearing of a mask really feels like a matter of life or death, and when others will do so to be supportive of people they don’t even know, it’s nothing less than heroism.

So, please, be one of our heros. If it has been recommendedwhere you live, and you are at all able, wear a mask when you’re out. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

 

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