RiverMan Media

One of the toughest aspects of creating digital art is grasping how computers produce different colors. Mixing red, green, and blue light is quite different than mixing colors of paint. However, choosing colors via RGB values is fundamental to working digitally.

This exercise will help you intuitively feel how red, green, and blue light combine to create the entire gamut of visible colors. We will also explore the opposite of additive RGB color mixing: subtractive CMY (cyan, magenta, yellow) color synthesis.

Tools and Setup

I will be demonstrating in Photoshop CS4 for this tutorial. Any version of Photoshop that supports painting in Multiply and Linear Dodge modes should work fine though. It’s also important to use a pressure sensitive pen tablet, because we will be painting with only three colors, with opacity controlled by the stylus.

Choose brushes that vary their opacity with pen pressure. There are several default brushes in Photoshop that have this characteristic. Also set the eraser of your stylus to use these brushes. You should be able to make marks like this:

Once you have the brushes set up, we can start experimenting with mixing color.