Any Color You Like so Long as it's Black

One of the mistakes a lot of beginning colorists make is in how they mix colors. They often take their base tone, and add either Black to it to make it darker, or add white to make a color lighter.

There are times when it makes sense to do this, but those are the exceptions, rather than the rule. The problem with adding Black or White to a color is that it starts to neutralize the colors.

With lighter colors, adding white not only makes them lighter, but it dilutes the saturation. The color grey is 50% white.

With darker colors, adding black not only makes them darker, but it dilutes intensity of the color. The color grey is also 50% black.

In the color bars below, you can see where colors start losing their intensity in the outlined area. Not only that, but colors will shift. That yellow will actually start printing greenish within the 20% mark on the color bar.

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Let's look at what adding pure white does to the same color bars.

In the image below, after about 20% along the color bar, the colors are losing intensity and purity. as you get to the outlined area, the colors are losing saturation dramatically, turning to grey at the very end.

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By increasing the C, M, and Y for various colors, we can get darker, rich colors that don't fade to grey or lose their saturation.

With the first bar, increasing the yellow, and adding magenta keeps the color warm and saturated while still giving us darker color and value, without shifting the color to greenish yellow like adding black would.

In the second bar, increasing the Cyan, and adding more magenta and a touch of yellow gives rich dark blue.

With red, adding Cyan and a touch of black gives nice dark blood reds. Note - Red is one of the very few colors you can add black to. You add a little bit to offset the Cyan you add, otherwise you can end up with a purplish red. The Cyan makes the red darker, while a little black (less than half the Cyan amount) keeps the color from shifting to something purplish.

With the green, increasing the Yellow and Cyan to 100% and increasing the magenta gives us saturated dark greens.

With purple, increasing the Cyan and Magenta, and adding yellow keeps the intensity of the color while making it darker.

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To make colors lighter, reduce the amounts of C, M, and Y.

For the yellow, we dropped the Magenta to 0, and dropped the Yellow to about 25%, which will print very light, while still keeping it's bright warm color.

With the Blue, I decrease the Magenta dramatically, eliminated all the Yellow, and reduced the Cyan to about 30%

With the Green, I decrease the Magenta to 0, drop the Cyan drastically, and reduce the yellow by 50%, but still keep more yellow than Cyan, so the green stays a warm color. In lighter colors, equal Cyan and Yellow tends to produce cooler greens.

With the Purple, I eliminated all the Yellow, dropped the Cyan by about 60%, and reduced the Magenta about 40%.

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When mixing lighter and darker colors, use the slider bars in your color palette instead to reduce the C, M, Y components of the color to keep the color's intensity and saturation. Don't add Black or White to adjust the value of a color, because you're not only changing the value, but the saturation and purity of a color.

You can find great information like this in Jose M. Parramon's Color Theory. While the book is aimed at mixing paints and painting, the color theory explained in this book applies to coloring comics.