Hello fellow art lovers and curious minds! Following our color explorations, today we’re diving into a fundamental question in the world of color mixing: what happens when you mix red and green? Get ready for a hands-on color adventure as we uncover the answer, and it might just surprise you. This is another essential piece to add to our ever-expanding color mixing knowledge, and the results are quite fascinating.
Red and Green Create Brown: The Classic Color Mix
As demonstrated in the illustration above, the most common result of mixing red and green is brown. In the digital artwork shown, created using Procreate’s “Airbrush” tool and then blended with the “Smudge” tool, you can clearly see the transformation. It’s quite remarkable how two vibrant and bright colors combine to produce such a muted and earthy tone like brown. Notice how the resulting brown shade on the right almost blends into the black background! Let’s delve into further experiments to fuel your creative drawings and color understanding.
Beyond Brown: Exploring the Nuances of Red and Green Combinations
After investigating “What Does Purple and Green Make?”, it became clear that color mixing can have multiple outcomes. So, naturally, we must explore if red and green offer more than just one color result.
As you can observe in the illustration above (created with the “Marker” brush and smudged using finger pressure for deep mixing) and the one below (using the “Acrylic” paintbrush and smudging), the answer is more complex than simply “brown.” Just like our exploration into “What Does Purple and Orange Make?”, seemingly simple color questions can lead to a spectrum of answers.
A Spectrum of Browns: Unveiling Different Shades
Indeed, mixing green and red doesn’t just give you one brown, but a wide variety of brown shades. This expands the answer to include a whole palette of options such as: khaki, tan, nude, skin tones, chocolate, and even mud. (Perhaps this sparks an idea for art prompts: imagine illustrating the diverse shades of brown!)
If you start with a lighter red, like pink, mixing it with green will yield a lighter brown, specifically tan. This is because green and pink make a lighter shade of brown. On the other end of the spectrum, red and green can combine to create a deep, rich brown, so intense it can almost appear… black!
Complimentary Colors and the Magic of Black!
Yes, you read that right! While brown is the typical result, with the right shades of red and green, you can even achieve black. Why is this possible? Black is created by mixing all three primary colors: red, yellow, and blue (as shown in the illustration above). Green, being a secondary color, is composed of yellow and blue. Therefore, combining red and green essentially brings together all the primary colors.
Another way to explain this is through the concept of complementary colors. Red and green are complementary colors, and when mixed in the correct proportions, they can neutralize each other to create black. Achieving true black depends on the pigmentation and balance of the primary colors within the red and green you are using. To further explore creating neutral colors like black, gray, brown, and tan, you might find our post on what colors make brown insightful.
Observe the experiment below: initially, layering “Marker” brush strokes of green and red produced black. Then, by smudging and reducing the saturation or color intensity (as seen at the bottom of the heart shape), brown emerged.
The Color Fusion: Brown, Black, and Beyond
So, there you have it! Red and green primarily make brown – ranging from light tans to deep chocolate hues, depending on the specific shades you use. They can also surprisingly create black, especially when the saturation is intense and the color balance is precise. We hope you’ve enjoyed this exploration into the fascinating world of color mixing and art inspiration. What color combination are you curious about exploring next? Let us know!
Want to delve deeper? Explore “What do Orange and Green Make?” for more color discoveries.
By Lillie Marshall, Artist and Educator.
