euclase:

yokoboo:

:

Most black paint isn’t very rich, so it can look flat or dull when you paint with it. So to get richer shadows, artists will mix dark colors together and use that instead of black. Bob Ross does this a lot—you’ll always hear him talk about Van Dyke Brown.

That’s paint, though? Digital art is different. Black is black in digital art, and it usually always reads as a shadow. Sometimes black can be too dark, in fact. Like if your screen is set too bright, black can look like a big hole, so you’ve gotta be careful.

I almost never use black. I usually use very dark purple or red because it makes everything look softer. But it still reads as black:

To add a little bit onto this with an explanation given to me by a professional illustrator when I was in college.

Black is flat.  Digital or traditional, you can’t go darker than black, since it is the absence of light.  So if you’re painting something that is black, how do you show shadow and form?  You can’t, really.  So it’s important to train yourself to see the color that’s actually there- even if it’s really dark it’s almost never just black.

Black, like Euclase said, also dull other colors- it has no saturation so when you use it with other colors it steals saturation from those colors (like warmth getting sucked out of a room when you open the door) and makes things look lifeless- so as a painter when you use it and want to maintain saturation, you gotta spend more time and paint putting saturation back into it using super saturated colors like yellow/orange.  It’d simply faster and easier on new painters to use something like burnt umber/sienna to start with to darken colors than trying to compensate for the weird things black does to color.  Black, being hueless also neutralized whatever color you’re mixing it with, and that can mess with the color harmony of your piece- ie If you’re using cool tones, adding black/grey or neutralizing tones can make your colors look warmer and vice versa.  It’s much better/easier to use darker paints in the tones you’re already using to shade than to introduce something that will alter the temperature of your piece.

Black DOES have it’s place and time, and knowing how it affects other colors will be to your advantage when, for instance, you want your artwork (or a portion of it) to look lifeless or less rich.  Or if you want to alter the temperature of a color without going full hog/increasing or maintaining the saturation.  Or if you really want to play into the idea of things/shapes/subjects getting lost in the black.

It’s not about following rules by rote memorization (ie remember this math formula and plug it in when you see these kinds of numbers), it’s about understand why and what happens when you DO use it and then using it to your advantage.

^ Yes to all of that. Thank you.

Seeing is definitely the most important. Especially when you’re working within one color like black, because ultimately it is just another color, and it will affect and be affected by everything around it, even within and by itself:

If you practice seeing relationships, you will notice more than just “black hair” and “black shirt" (hint: there isn’t any actual black in this painting). 

And as Jess says, it’s about understanding why and what happens and then using it to your advantage. Here’s an example of a portrait where the palette is entirely yellow, but because I understand the relationships between colors, I can convey “blue eyes” and “white shirt” and “blue tie” to you, and that’s what you perceive, even though I didn’t use those colors at all: