What Colors You Can Use To Make Black

What Colors Make Black?

When trying to figure out what colors will make the best black for your painting you first need to consider this. Technically, black is the absence of any colour, darkness. However in painting black, like brown, is a tertiary colour. That is, it is made by mixing a primary colour with a secondary colour. To put it another way, you mix all three primary colours together.

If you want to know which colours I use to make black then you can skip to the end of this article but if you want a better understanding of the colour theory behind my choice then please read on.

A while ago I created a colour wheel chart which shows you that you can make a heap of different browns and greys by mixing primary and secondary colours. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can download it here. That’s great if you need brown or grey for a painting but what about black? What paint colors should you use if you want to make a really dark black?

To Buy or Not To Buy

“Why can’t I just use the black paint I have in a tube”, I hear you say. Well, of course you can but here is the thing about that. If black is the absence of any colour then how do paint companies make black paint. The answer is that they can’t. All they can do is make something that is very close to black. This means that any paint you buy will be biased towards one colour or another. That’s okay because anything the eye can see is biased towards one colour or another as well, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to see it. Am I making your head spin yet?

The problem arises when the black you have in your kit just doesn’t look black enough in your painting. Sometimes it just doesn’t have that rich, dark vibrancy that you are looking for. Blacks from the tube, just like white from the tube, can often look flat and dull in your work. It is in these instances that you will find mixing your own blacks will give you a much better result.

How to Figure Out What Colors Will Make The Right Black

In painting, black is a tertiary colour made by mixing primary and secondary colours together. My colour wheel chart shows us that mixing primary and secondary colours together gives us a number of variations of brown or grey but does not show black. So what colors can you use to make black? Read on to find out why some colors will make black and some won’t

You make have noticed that some acrylic paint colours are transparent and some are opaque. Well, the ones that are transparent have more pure pigment and the ones that are opaque generally have varying degrees of white in them. Any paint that has a lot of white in it is never going to give you a really dark black. That is why the first thing to remember when making blacks is to use the more transparent variants of each colour.

The second thing to remember is that your paint colours are not pure primary colours. They are warm or cool versions of a primary colour. That means your blue, for example, will either lean more towards green in or purple.

Now, you want to find a primary and a secondary colour that are as transparent as possible. Also, you want these two colours to be as close to directly opposite each other on the colour wheel as possible. Mix them together and you have created your blackest blacks.

My Preferred Colors To Make The Blackest Black

Now that you know how it’s done you can experiment with your own paints to find your favourite black. Below are my two favourite colour combinations for making black with the brand of acrylic paints that I use, Atelier.

  • ultramarine blue/burnt sienna
  • pthalo turquoise/napthol crimson

The Not-So-Black Blacks

There are some occasions where I don’t need a super dark black. In this case I do use paint straight from the tube. My favourite colour choices in this instance are:

  • Paynes Grey
  • Blue black (indigo)

Try It Out For Yourself

So there you have it. This is how I make black for all my paintings. I will use any one of the above combinations depending on the colour palette I am using for the individual artwork. Unless you are using the same brand of paint that I am then you will likely have different colours in your kit. Now that you know the process of mixing blacks I encourage you to try out different colour combinations for yourself and. If you find one that you think looks blacker than my blacks please let me know by emailing me at jen@bluebeachhouseart.com

I hope you found this article to be useful and I would love it if you could like, share and/or leave a comment. If there is something I could have done better or if you have any topic suggestions for future articles I’d love to hear that too. Email me at jen@bluebeachhouseart.com

You can get my free colour wheel chart and you can receive more free art resources from me in your inbox by signing up to my email list below.

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