Part 3. How paints mix

Part 2 ended with a model that predicts the color of any mixture of the 26 calibrated Golden paints, the ones whose tints with white Okumura measured, together with titanium white. This part puts the model to work on the questions a painter meets at the palette. Most of the figures here are computed with it. Wherever Okumura measured the same mixture, his measurement is drawn beside the prediction, and Figure 19(a) shows his measurements alone. The masstone colors quoted in this part are the model’s, which can sit a little away from the measured ones (Section 2.6).

We start with what happens along the way from one paint to another, and why transparent and opaque paints mix so differently. Then come the effects of white: why reds turn pink, why a dark transparent paint comes alive in a tint, when a mixture can be more vivid than both of its paints, why a glaze is not a tint, and what the white itself adds. The later lessons test the six-paint split-primary palette, mix every pair from a set of paints around the hue circle, ask whether black deadens a color, and end with how the paint industry matches colors.

The lessons in this part

• 3.1 Mixing lines
• 3.2 Subtractive and additive
• 3.3 Why red paints turn pink with white
• 3.4 Why transparent pigments gain chroma with white
• 3.5 Mixtures more chromatic than both parents
• 3.6 Glazes against tints
• 3.7 What white does to a hue
• 3.8 The split-primary palette tested with measured paints
• 3.9 A gallery of mixtures around the circle
• 3.10 Darkening with black and with the complement
• 3.11 Matching colors by computer