Color Shades and Tints

In color theory, a tint is the mixture of a color with white, which increases lightness, and a shade is the mixture of a color with black, which reduces lightness. Mixing with any neutral color, including black and white, reduces chroma or colorfulness, while the hue remains unchanged.

When mixing colored light (additive color models), the achromatic mixture of spectrally balanced red, green and blue (RGB) is always white, not gray or black. When we mix colorants, such as the pigments in paint mixtures, a color is produced which is always darker and lower in chroma, or saturation, than the parent colors. This moves the mixed color toward a neutral color-a gray or near-black. Lights are made brighter or dimmer by adjusting their brightness, or energy level. In painting, lightness is adjusted through mixture with white, black or a color's complement.


It is common among some painters to darken a paint color by adding black paint-producing colors called shades-or lighten a color by adding white-producing colors called tints. However it is not always the best way for representational painting, as an unfortunate result is for colors to also shift in hue. For instance, darkening a color by adding black can cause colors such as yellows, reds and oranges, to shift toward the greenish or bluish part of the spectrum. Lightening a color by adding white can cause a shift towards blue when mixed with reds and oranges. Another practice when darkening a color is to use its opposite, or complementary, color (e.g. purplish-red added to yellowish-green) in order to neutralize it without a shift in hue, and darken it if the additive color is darker than the parent color. When lightening a color this hue shift can be corrected with the addition of a small amount of an adjacent color to bring the hue of the mixture back in line with the parent color (e.g. adding a small amount of orange to a mixture of red and white will correct the tendency of this mixture to shift slightly towards the blue end of the spectrum).

Color Proportions

When colors are juxtaposed, our eyes perceive a visual mix. This mix will differ depending on the proportions of allocated areas.

* The color with the largest proportional area is the dominant color (the ground)

* Smaller areas are sub dominant colors.

* Accent colors are those with a small relative area, but offer a contrast because of a variation in hue, intensity, or saturation (the figure).

* Placing small areas of light color on a dark background, or a small area of dark on a light background will create an accent.

* If large areas of a light hue are used, the whole area will appear light; conversely, if large areas of dark values are used, the whole area appears dark. Alternating color by intensity rather than proportion will also change the perceived visual mix of color.