RiverMan Media

CMY Color Wheel

Monitors add red, green, and blue light to black to create colors. However, printed media, such as magazines, subtract from white using cyan, magenta, and yellow. To get used to how this works, let’s create another color wheel, this time using subtractive color.

Create a white layer and lock its transparency. Set the background color to white and set the brush tool to Multiply mode. Using only cyan, magenta, and yellow, try to create a color wheel similar to this:

In subtractive color, magenta and cyan make blue, yellow and magenta make red, cyan and yellow make green, and all three together make black.

CMY from a Photo

Now let’s try using CMY color with a photo. Create a white layer with locked transparency and invert the trace of your photo so that the outlines are black.

Using only pure cyan, magenta, and yellow, start to block in the shapes from your photo.

It won’t look a whole lot like the photo when you start… Don’t worry, you’ll get there! Keep on layering colors:

Here I’ve finally started combining mixes of all three colors to achieve darker tones:

At this stage I’m mostly working on the background in order to darken it to an almost neutral gray:

I continue lifting colors with the white eraser and adding them back in with the brush until I’m happy with the accuracy of the colors:

As a final step, I blend some of the forms for continuity and to get rid of the visual noise created by layering:

Conclusion

I hope this exercise helped you get a better sense of how colors mix together both on the computer screen and in printed form. If you think about it, the entire job of the artist is to determine the color of each pixel in an image, so color mixing is absolutely fundamental to what we do! You certainly won’t want to create every image using the method I’ve shown here, but I hope it has helped you get a better sense of how the computer thinks about color.