- There's nothing like hands-on experience
with paints to solidify and expand what we know about color.
So whenever I get to talk to designers about color,
I suggest strongly that they paint, just for fun
if nothing else, to really come to grips with both
color theory and color application.
Now before I get into painting supplies and
actual painting projects, I want to return to something
we talked about way back at the beginning
of this course, it's the color wheel.
This color wheel.
The standard model that most art schools use
when they're teaching about color.
Well, how do I put this?
This color wheel, the one that we all know and love,
it's a lie.
Well, okay, it's not really, like, this outright lie.
But it's not exactly true, either.
The traditional color wheel with red, yellow, and blue
as its primaries, it doesn't quite mesh with
the reality of how colored pigments
behave in the real world.
But don't go and throw away everything
that we've talked about here about the color wheel.
This standard model color wheel is actually
so close to reality that you're going to be
perfectly fine using it for all the palette-building
and color formulating work that we've
been talking about, but it is worth knowing
that there's a lesser known color wheel
that works even better, especially
when it comes to using actual paints and inks.
It's called the CMY color wheel.
C is for cyan, M for magenta, and Y for yellow.
These are the primary hues of what I like to call
the painter's color wheel.
Very interestingly, cyan and magenta,
two of the primary colors of the painter's wheel,
it can't even be made using hues from
the standard color wheel.
If you've painted much, then you know
what I'm talking about here.
You just can't mix red, yellow, and/or blue
to make a true honest-to-goodness
vibrant cyan or a good-looking magenta.
Can't be done.
The painter's color wheel not only includes
true cyan and true magenta,
it features them as primary colors.
This wheel also includes red and blue,
primaries of the standard color wheel.
It's just that red and blue count only as
tertiary hues on the CMY wheel.
By the way, CMY, where have we heard these initials before?
Oh yeah, they're three of the four initials
in CMYK, as in CMYK printing inks.
That's right, printers learned a long time ago
that if they were ever going to print
a maximum range of colors,
they needed to go with the CMYK color wheel
instead of the traditional red, yellow, blue wheel.
Because of this connection between CMY color wheels
and a CMYK colors of printing, I'm going to suggest
in the very next movie that you actually
start painting using cyan, magenta, yellow and black paints.
Plus white.
These tubes of paint allow you to mix more colors
than you can get with tubes of red, blue and yellow.
Not only that, but every time you work with
cyan, magenta, yellow and black paints,
you're going to be learning color-related lessons
that can really help you out
the next time you're either choosing or
adjusting a CMYK formula for a layout or an illustration.
One more thing, you might be wondering,
"Why don't more people know about this
"CMY color wheel, the painter's color wheel?"
I mean, I wonder about that too.
I think it's just the matter of traditional.
People started getting used to this standard
color wheel a long time ago, and they just keep on using it.
And really, that's okay with me.
I like using and knowing about both of these wheels.
The CMY wheel and the standard wheel,
they're both very useful when it comes to
formulating colors and creating color schemes.
And guess what?
You can download copies of both of these wheels.
PDFs are included with the course.
Go get them.