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Fine painters will almost never use black. The pigment in black paint is very deadening and harsh, it's difficult to work with. It's much better to take the tim

Fine painters will almost never use black. The pigment in black paint is very deadening and harsh, it's difficult to work with. It's much better to take the time and create dark hues from the rest of the color wheel. A standard exercise in color theory classes is to create black from the primary colors. Most people end up with brown, but a beautiful, rich black and nearby shades can be accomplished, and it's worth the effort. Really? I have to admit that this surprises me. Black and white aren't on the same dimension as the hue. Playing with just the primary colours doesn't allow you to change the lightness of the mix. Depending on the lightness of your primary palette, you're going to produce some shade of grey, not black... That said, I'm not actually trying to contradict you, I'm just stating my understanding of the theory - I'd love it if you can explain to me where I've gone wrong! :)

city41 16y ago
This might be a bad analogy as I don't bake, but I imagine it's sort of like a really high end confectioner making an elegant dessert. When it comes to sweetening it they have many choices. They probably won't choose HFCS or stevia, because those two choices are rather "viral", they tend to invade everything else and dominate the flavor. Black pigment is sort of like that too. It has a deadening effect and often conflicts with the color palette an artist is going for. Yes red+black will equal a dark red, but kind of a flattend out muted one. Red+green+a smidge of the right blue can often yield a better dark tone that matches the palette and intent of the painting better. It also depends on the painter. Monet was all about exploring light and understanding light. For him the colors he chose were vital as was his ability to mix color, so oil paint was the natural choice for him. But take Lichtenstein, color was very secondary to his message and he even wanted bad color in a lot of ways. He painted in pure black pigment all the time, he even used acrylic paint which Monet would have scoffed at. I don't think anyone would try to suggest Lichtenstein was less of an artist, just his needs/message were different. When I first posted here and said "fine painter", I was refering to painters where the paint and pigments themselves are vital to their message, like Monet.
stan_rogers 16y ago
"Black" isn't. There are very dark browns and blues. Despite what the grandparent posting said, fine painters actually do use black, but not to produce darks (at least not in oils); the most common use for lamp black (the most neutral of the black pigments) is to create the iris colour for blue eyes in oil portraiture. For deep shadows, though, black pigments are very problematic in that it is extremely difficult to control the transition out of darkness. Because painting is a subtractive medium, one can obtain nearly the same level of darkness using other dark pigments in combination. An "old masters" chiaroscuro typically uses burnt umber plus a warm blue, such as aquamarine, for the great lake of "blackness" from which everything else emerges. Each of those pigments alone prevents the reflection of a rather broad segment of the spectrum, and together they approach true blackness. That, then, allows the artist to manage the transition out of darkness into either a warm or cool tone smoothly by decreasing the amount of the unneeded tone before lightening. Painters who use the Impressionist pallette will never go anywhere near that level of darkness -- their shadows will generally be just below a mid tone using the main colour of the object, cobalt or aquamarine blue, depending on the warmth or coolness of the main tone, and the complementary colour of the main tone, all in juxtaposition rather than as a mixture. The apparent darkness comes from contrast. The same principle, though, is used to create shadows in classical painting techniques (but with mixture) -- a darker version of the main tone plus the complement and often a touch of blue. These rules apply to oil painting. Pure pigments in oil are darker out of the tube than you might imagine due to the optical properties of the oil (which is why white paints are sold in huge tubes). In a medium like soft pastels, which doesn't encapsulate the pigment in a continuous film of a binding medium, blacks are used to create the bottom end of the spectrum out of necessity. Even then, though, a pure black is almost never used.

city41 16y ago

This might be a bad analogy as I don't bake, but I imagine it's sort of like a really high end confectioner making an elegant dessert. When it comes to sweetening it they have many choices. They probably won't choose HFCS or stevia, because those two choices are rather "viral", they tend to invade everything else and dominate the flavor. Black pigment is sort of like that too. It has a deadening effect and often conflicts with the color palette an artist is going for. Yes red+black will equal a dark red, but kind of a flattend out muted one. Red+green+a smidge of the right blue can often yield a better dark tone that matches the palette and intent of the painting better. It also depends on the painter. Monet was all about exploring light and understanding light. For him the colors he chose were vital as was his ability to mix color, so oil paint was the natural choice for him. But take Lichtenstein, color was very secondary to his message and he even wanted bad color in a lot of ways. He painted in pure black pigment all the time, he even used acrylic paint which Monet would have scoffed at. I don't think anyone would try to suggest Lichtenstein was less of an artist, just his needs/message were different. When I first posted here and said "fine painter", I was refering to painters where the paint and pigments themselves are vital to their message, like Monet.

stan_rogers 16y ago

"Black" isn't. There are very dark browns and blues. Despite what the grandparent posting said, fine painters actually do use black, but not to produce darks (at least not in oils); the most common use for lamp black (the most neutral of the black pigments) is to create the iris colour for blue eyes in oil portraiture. For deep shadows, though, black pigments are very problematic in that it is extremely difficult to control the transition out of darkness. Because painting is a subtractive medium, one can obtain nearly the same level of darkness using other dark pigments in combination. An "old masters" chiaroscuro typically uses burnt umber plus a warm blue, such as aquamarine, for the great lake of "blackness" from which everything else emerges. Each of those pigments alone prevents the reflection of a rather broad segment of the spectrum, and together they approach true blackness. That, then, allows the artist to manage the transition out of darkness into either a warm or cool tone smoothly by decreasing the amount of the unneeded tone before lightening. Painters who use the Impressionist pallette will never go anywhere near that level of darkness -- their shadows will generally be just below a mid tone using the main colour of the object, cobalt or aquamarine blue, depending on the warmth or coolness of the main tone, and the complementary colour of the main tone, all in juxtaposition rather than as a mixture. The apparent darkness comes from contrast. The same principle, though, is used to create shadows in classical painting techniques (but with mixture) -- a darker version of the main tone plus the complement and often a touch of blue. These rules apply to oil painting. Pure pigments in oil are darker out of the tube than you might imagine due to the optical properties of the oil (which is why white paints are sold in huge tubes). In a medium like soft pastels, which doesn't encapsulate the pigment in a continuous film of a binding medium, blacks are used to create the bottom end of the spectrum out of necessity. Even then, though, a pure black is almost never used.