Mixing Colors for Oil Paintings
Monday, February 8, 2010
In order for us to see anything, there must be light. Light from the sun contains all the colors, as demonstrated when the sun light shines through a prism and is broken into all the colors of the rainbow.
When the sun shines on a red apple, we see that the apple is red because the skin of the apple absorbs the remaining colors. Likewise, a green apple reflects the green light and absorbs the others.
Paints that we use in oil paintings are especially dense in pigments. When we mix them, we are mixing “color”. We are working with the pigments that reflect the colors we want to see (and absorbing all the rest), and combining these colors to form the other colors we want to see.