An important ability to the aspiring painter is the ability to identify, name and mix colors. The trick is to avoid poetic-sounding clothing catalog names for colors like "ecru" and "macadamia," and to see them as lightened or neutralized versions of one of the basic colors of the rainbow.

Is it a kind of yellow? An orange? A red? Before you can push a color warmer or cooler, or darken it down by mixing it with its complement, you have to be able to see it for what it really is.

I've found that my digital camera and the "eyedropper tool" in Photoshop have helped my sharpen my talent for seeing underlying "base" colors in a wide array of subtle and otherwise hard to name tints and tones. I've made a game out out it — a little game I like to call...

...What color is it?

By the way, no earth tones are allowed in this game. No umbers or siennas or ochres. You have to mix them yourself from the primaries and secondaries.

Here's a tricky one: a set of keys I have. What color are those keys, anyway? I see greens and golds and browns.

Browns are usually dark oranges. Sometimes they are dark reds. Khaki colors are neutralized yellows. The funny thing is, many of the greenish colors you may see are often darkened, neutralized yellows. It's hard to get used to this fact, but it's true.

I've gotten pretty good at specifying base colors, but sometimes I guess wrong. If I do guess wrong, it's not such a big deal; it's easy to push the color a little bit more one way or another on the palette.

"Purple Mountan Majesties" aside, When you're outside, it's hard to believe those distant earth tones are really violet greys. They still seem so brown. Everyone is familiar with the academic exercise known as the "Albers Effect," the fact pointed out by Josef Albers that the perception of a color depends on its context. You can really see it in action here. The atmospheric blue context makes it (for me at least) a bit harder to see those distant earth tone browns for the violets they really are, instead of the dusty khakis I know them to be. (The salmon and powder blue rectangles below both surround the same color chip.)

For an interesting book on color mixing and pigment, I recommend Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green by Michael Wilcox. The title of this book is not "symbolic" or falsely provocative; it's actually true. Blue and Yellow really don't make green. Express the colors as RGB triples, and a little simple image arithmetic demonstrates that pure blue (0 0 1) and pure yellow (1 1 0) when mixed (or filtered one through the other, or arithmetically multiplied) of course don't make green (0 1 0) — They make the product of (0 0 1) times (1 1 0) which is black (0 0 0) — The only way the product of those two color vectors will contain green is if both of them contain some non-zero amount of green to begin with.

The reason cyan and yellow make green is because cyan times yellow does make green: that is, (0 1 1) * (1 1 0) = (0 1 0) -- the product of the two colors contains green because they each contained some non-zero amount of green to begin with. For more on digital image arithmetic as it relates to the mixing of pigments, read my page on Photoshop's multiply blend mode.