CMY vs RBY colours. Who cares? 

Usually I prefer the CMY for more vibrant, "trendy", modern things and RBY for a more natural look...

I think the appeal of knowing the “true primaries” is that it allows you to buy fewer paints if on a budget since you know you can mix colours you don’t have if you need to. If you paint all the time or do it professionally then it makes sense to just invest in a wider range of paints. It’s also just good to know what colours are best for mixing what though, if you do run low on a certain colour and need to mix your own. CMY and RBY are both useful but, if limited in what you can purchase, it’s worth knowing you can make RBY from CMY. There are colours I prefer made with the RBY palette but I can make the RBY palette from CMY. I’d still ideally have both though.

A couple decades in advertising production had taught me RGB is unreproducible and is for a screen only. We'd go round and round with clients complaining how the proof on their computer screen didn't exactly match the final printed product. They couldnt understand why it was never going to. Huge hassle

I personally prefer CMY triad, because it gives me the most vibrant colors. I can always tone the brightness down, but I can't make them more vibrant. I love the CMY in my limited travel palettes.

Great walk-through! My vote: Split primary ftw. I remember feeling cheated and defeated as a kid when I tried mixing from the RBY primary, because the purples were dull. Then I tried CMY later and the orange hues gave me grief, but by then I understood why, but it made me kind of give up on "cerebral" color theory and just go by my gut for years. Dr. Oto Kano just turned me onto the split primary a couple of months ago and I my fascination with colors and pigments has been renewed with videos like hers and yours. Thank you.

"why would you try to mix colors when you could just buy the tube,' yes teoh, continue to enable me!!!

I think CMY is more versatile but I dont really think it matters, nowadays people have rather large palettes of colours and have both a CMY and RBY combo.

Teoh: CYM or RYB. Which one is better? Also Teoh: It doesn't matter, you can buy all of them.

This video was so helpful in clarifying things for me as a beginner. I purchased the primary set from Daniel Smith. I really enjoy discovering the range of colors I can create from the three colors (Perylene red, French ultramarine, and Hansa yellow medium) they really lend themselves well to more natural colors. I see here the C,M,Y combination makes some very nice bright colors, especially violets and purples. I get really muted and sometimes muddy purples with RBY combo I have. I now understand the differences between using the two combinations, and when to use each one, depending on what my desired outcome is. Thank you, I really needed this.

yes, for beginners to learn their colors need to, in my opinion, start with CYM palette. I think it trains the eyes to see color possibilities.

I like CMY because it mix purple more vibrant.. But when doing urban sketch, my palette is more depend on RBY 😅

This is why all high quality photo printers these days have eight or more cartridges of inks that are a blend of pigment and dye. Pigments are more subject to metamorization, but are more light-fast; dyes are less likely to metamorize in different lighting conditions (because they are not physical granuals, the light does not reflect differently off of the surface like pigments, which are tiny granuals of color), but are less light-fast. To achieve the largest color gamut and the best longevity of color that is most stable, photo printers print with a large set of inks that are also blended dye and pigment. Still there are gaps in the color gamut even the highest quality photo printers. As far as watercolor goes, a small tin can usually accommodate twelve half pans or more. Why not carry both CMY and RYB colors along with convenience colors that are difficult to mix quickly and accurately (or might include interesting effects such as granulation), right?

I agree, use colours you like. Personally I prefer the CMY basics cause I lean more towards pinks and bright purples when I paint for flowers. However I make sure I have a nice mix of colour options cause you never know what colour you may need.

Great video! I use CMYK at work but have never thought about it for painting. Thank you.

I agree you should use whatever colours you have available. Though I've played with a CMYK palette for funsies in the past and I loved it. I think a black is really essential in the set imo in order to be able to actually get dark colours, though. Nowadays I have both my CMYK colours and my RGB colours all in the same limited palette of 17 and it is such a wonderfully versatile palette. They're a lot easier to use in a palette with more colours and convenience mixes, instead of having to mix basic colours all the time which can be a bit of a pain like you said. I definitely agree with you there :) I have found Pthlalo Blue far too strong for a cyan for my liking. It took a long time searching but I managed to find a colour from a local paint maker called Wallace Seymor, who makes a blue called Cobalt Turquoise Light Genuine using Pb36. A close alternative would be cobalt teal from other brands but they are all a little too yellow leaning and I have yet to find a matching alternative. My personal favourite colours for a CMYK palette are bismuth vanadate lemon yellow and opera rose from Daniel Smith, Cobalt Turquoise light genuine by Wallace Seymor plus ivory black or mars black from Winsor and Newton Professional.

I love how you "" with your hands when you said true magenta. Thank you for making this video, clever video name. Like you said, use the colours you have and love, and experiment. Great advice!

Great video Teoh! I always wondered if that theory applied to watercolors too. Now I know! Both are good color palettes in my opinion. Looks like I might need to explore them more! Ohhh seeing your limited palette sketchbook is inspiring me to make my own! Lol 😂

Thank you for this Teoh! I've been struggling lately with colour and I had to go back to the basic colour theory lessons. The video helped a lot.

Ever since I got back to using watercolors, I have just used the split primary palette. It's just 6 colors plus quin burnt orange; because, I don't have burnt sienna. It has worked well for me all these years.

I really enjoyed this video!! So informative and entertaining to watch.

This was really informative. Thanks for this video!

Very interesting indeed. Thank you again Teoh.

I have been doing experiments like this, I think I will follow along with this video and do this experiment myself as well. It's very useful for learning as long as we don't get attached to one way being right or wrong!

I don't have Quinacridone Lilac, but I did really like the mixes you got from this it, so I think I'll add that to the list. The CMY palette you created does look good if you're building a tiny travel palette.

I love your limited color palette vids! Great tip to let people know they need to experiment to find out what colors work for them :)

I definitely prefer granulating colors, but I do like having the split palette option, so I can mix anything I want. (although I have a ton of convenience colors anyway, and some I won't give up!) Thanks for this video!

My personal color palette uses both systems with the addition of burnt umber, raw sienna, and titanium white. I find that their strengths and weaknesses cover for each other nicely, and I don’t have to buy a bunch of other niche colors because I can always get something very close

I knew about this combination for printing, but I never thought about it for painting. I did the experiment and found that I really liked the flexibility of this combination, especially the magenta vs a more traditional red. I tend to like having 'all the colors' and exercises like this help me think about using the restrictions of fewer colors in a new way. Thanks!

This is great, would love to see more colour theory stuff!

CMY because you can mix a warm blue and a warm red and mix all the colors you want in those general color families. Obviously you can’t mix specific watercolors like an ultramarine or a pyrrol scarlet, but you can mix a vibrant warm blue and a warm red, while if you choose RBY you can’t even mix a vibrant purple or a vibrant green. CMY gives you more variety in a limited set.

Thank you so much for a good overview.

BMY 😎 magenta is the true primary color for red... pthalo blue greenshade, quinacridone crimson, Indian yellow, titanium white can make any color except neon secondarys

It could be my iPhone screen but Thalo Blue seems a lot more blue than cyan which is closer to cobalt teal. Personally I use a split primary set of six rather than just three. Great video though. Thank you.

I don't have a favourite primary colour combination, I like to experiment but the CMY one it's pretty vibrant. Thanks for this video :)

Just "found" you courtesy of RU-vid algorithms. Thanks ever so much for the informative video and sharing your considerable talent with the world.

in general i tend to use the cmy but, you have to choose the right magenta. i tend to prefer permanent rose because lilac is tooo cold. there are some permanent roses that are made with PR122 and i think those were the ones that were being recomended to you. It's not possible to create every single colour with either system, specially if you want to have granulation, but that's why most people won't use only cmy or rby. i'd choose cmy and then add my favourite granulating colours along with either an orange or warm red.

If the widest possible color gamut is the goal then CMY based palette is the way to go. However limited to just 3 primaries the CMY palette is actually lacking as well. The complete CMY based palette actually contains paint colors such as Ultramarine blue and Pyrrol Scarlet. When limiting a palette out of necessity to only 3 colors it makes more sense to select CMY triad because of its versatility but again, even it has its limitations when cut down to just 3 colors.

The smallest palette that I have is a 12 color range, it has both CMY and RBY plus a few convenience colors like a teal, payne's grey and a Buff Titanium. It makes for some very interesting color combos when I don't feel like bringing out my giant palette.

I prefer cmy because I'm picky about my reds. I use a medium yellow though like py154 so there isn't a green or red bias.

I prefer both but i mostly reach out for cmy colors prob because of the coloring style i use, but all in all, both are very beautiful color palettes

A good demonstration of why a split primary system might give the easiest and widest wide gamut if you need to limit your palette size. Or RYB primaries with secondaries, which can also work well. (I gotta have a diox purple, personally.) I dislike the muddy secondaries you get if you limit yourself to any three primaries - at least one of the secondaries will be dull.

I paint in oils rather than watercolours, but I like a cross between the two triads. Cad Yellow Light, Quin Rose (PV16), and French Ultramarine. Add in a Burnt Sienna and its pretty perfect. I would use these colours for watercolour painting as well.

Depends if I need to design a printer with the widest possible gamut, or if I just want to paint. :-)

There is no primary ink colour for blue its mix of Magenta + Cyan and as for red (Magenta + Yellow) will create these colors. Unfortunately we are being thought from an early age to use RBY when it should be CMY to mix ink/paint. Its the mistake people make when they use the primary blue and red from light and translate it to ink. Subtractive colour mixing (ink CMYK) and additive colour mixing (light RGB) are 2 complete different systems. There are no tv's running on CMYK and there is no printing company that prints in RGB :-).

I'd like to learn CMY, it seems like an interesting way of mixing. I don't learn it though because the colours I use are usually complex browns. I would imagine that newer artists will learn CMY over RBY but RBY will remain the standard for mixing for a long time to come because the natural tones that come from it are much easier to achieve.

Im actually just starting in watercolors but I did make a primaries only palette because I need to learn color mixing. As for which to choose I don’t see a problem unless one color prevented another color from being mixed then in that case at least for me id pick a different shade or with some different properties depending on how it was preventing me from mixing a color I want.

I think if you used a true cyan and magenta instead of blue and dark magenta, you would actually get more vibrant and true to colour palette

He has such an ASMR voice. Very soothing

Interesting. Thank you!

other painting videos I've watched have described it as being in colour universes and knowing that one set you can paint x amount of colours while in another you have y amount. cmy comes up a lot in gouache because of its history of being focused towards designers and requiring colours that can be reproduced with a printer. i wish i could just go out and buy premixed colours when i need them, but im not a famous youtube painter :c ;)

For the CMY I like to use Quinacridone PV42

Great video

😍 thank you

I agree, I like RBY triads for landscapes and urban sketching for the most part, and only use CMY for brighter effects. In my opinion, CMY triads produce colors that are often much brighter than reality which works well for illustration, florals and many painting styles, but doesn't necessarily represent the real world. I love to play with bright (CMY), mid-tone (RBY) and earthy triads for different uses. One quibble with the printing info: CMY/CMYK is not layered like watercolor, the colors are mixed out of dot patterns of the 3 or 4 colors. CMYK on-demand printers like ink jet and dye-sublimation are dots only. However, in traditional commercial printing yellow is sometimes printed third and black printed last and can be layered over the other colors depending on the print options, for example text heavy solutions may have a solid black to make the text easier to read.

CMY for me is the simplest and most versatile (if you only can have 3 tubes.) But a split palette of six, warm and cool primaries is the most versatile. The warm can use Raw Sienna or Indian Yellow or Ochre , Add in an earth color (transparent red oxide) or burnt sienna and you can make almost anything. I generally have no use for tube greens.

Just do both and get a more neutral yellow and split primaries for R+B. For a super limited pallette I think Ultramarine + a cool red give a more natural look and are easier to mix than super saturated colors, but without Phthalo you won't be getting very saturated greens or light blues.

I have both cool and warm primaries on my palette, because they both have their strengths and weaknesses and honestly makes it more versatile. I think you mentioned that in a video about making your palette more versatile and you basically said to add more primaries lol

Thanks for the video. Where does cobalt blue fit in?

I am a beginner to watercolor and i am thinking of buying winsor and newton cotman watercolor but i only want the primarys cold and warm can anyone tell me what those 6 colors are

8:43 CMY was a game changer for me learning to reproduce the colours I see not the colours I think I see! I definitely recommend trying them for a few months, you might be surprised at what it teaches about colours. I think RYB is better suited to landscapes though, everything natural is really a tertiary anyway.

I really like your videos.

Split primary is the best option for me

I usually have the six of them in my palette

since my favourite red is carmine, it doesn't feel like I'm missing out on magenta. and I would argue that in history, there were less words for colours, so magenta would possibly have been called red anyway.

Wouldn't it be necessary to layer the CMY colors to fully get the color potential of that system, instead of mixing beforehand? Thanks

What brown and black might you add to these? Those are hard colors to mix.

I really like the CMY system, but really it boils down to if you'd rather have a warm or cool palette.

I am intrested in getting to know wich colours would print well. Lemon yellow prints mustard in my experience

I think it's worth just using your store-bought red and blue, but for mixing greens and purples, you will get much more vibrant hues with cmy.

Lemon yellow for me is like yellow + a tiny little drop of blue. I'd rather choose some pure strong cold yellow for CYM so I can have a nice red along with nice purples.

New painter here. I've looked at most of the student grades paints in the US. VanGoh, Academy, Cotman and big box house brands. I don't see paints just labeled as CMYK or RYB. It sure would be easier.

QUESTION: so if you want to make prints that reproduce true to your original, should you use the CMY ?

In my opinion when I do cool Colors paintings coy does bettter and ryb is good for warm colors

phthalo blue awww- Bob Ross anyone?

I learned, doing acrylic, that there are actually 2 of each primary colours you need, because 3 will make warm colours, other 3 will make cold colours. Can't remember them at the top of my head

I don't think that CMY works so well for landscapes. The greens to me look quite artificial. Though, I have some of what you might consider both. I guess what would be the double primary system (warm/cool primaries). Thanks for your video, I have wondered re: the assertion you could mix any color with CMY. I suppose if the colors were actually CMY--hard to do this with paint.

I was taught in school that RGB are the primaries and it frustrated me for years. Now that I know, I can't believe this misinformation is spread so much. It's science, so why is there even a debate? That being said, I see why a landscape artist doesn't want quin magenta or the staining phthalo blue on their palette. There's also a certain harmony that using a triad that isn't CMY can bring to your paintings. I think we should know the true primaries, but not be afraid to experiment with other colors.

Interesting, I didn’t know some watercolours have a different texture. Although you can mix any colour with a true CMY palette, I see why you'd prefer to have a wider variety in watercolour for the effect. The limited colour palette would probably work better with acrylic and oil paints as I haven’t noticed different textures in my little acrylic sets. Someone with better paints may correct me, though. That's also the reason I'd prefer to mix colours, I don’t have the money or space to collect every colour separately.

😕 I like all colors but my favorite is orange, green, violet/purple. It hits.

Second acct second viewing two subs and more RU-vid crack. You just have this personality that invites me to want to just listen to you talk. I do love your color wheels and I got a tube of Daniel Smith Artist Watercolor New Gamborge on one of your video's suggestions. Also I am moving to Myrtle Beach so I needed more sand colors. Colorado doesn't have a whole hell of a lot of water so.. Anyway stay real brother!!

It's why I have doubts using the CMY pallete as my main palette as it would be a chore to mix blue and red, and mixing bright oranges can be a problem. And since the palette is based on printer inks, and printers use black, black is the least thing I want to not to avoid, but to be careful of. On the other hand, if I overrely on the RYB palette, it would feel too limited in some cases. You'll never know if you'll need a bright purple or an intense pink if the subject demands it. It's why split primaries became a compromise to both palettes.

i thing cmy has a leg up. if you think about it you have yellow, magenta and yellow become red, and cyan and magenta become blue. RYB gamut is largely included in cmy.

Yeoh : *makes video about cmy* Also Yeoh : *uses yellow, pink and blue*

The py175 is not a middle yellow. It leans a little towards the green.

What do you mean by granulated and non- granulated ?

I learned painting using RBY, but personally I think it doesn't matter. If you need something more vibrant, use CMY. Both palettes are good and versatile, depends on what you need.

Is this a naming for colors for artists? CMYK VS RGB in Photoshop is the more precise nomenclature. CMYK is usually used by printer companies I believe.

I am going to paint casually and I will only buy cyan, magenta, yellow, black, and white paint. Buying 4 shades of blue and 6 shades of orange is such a waste of time and money and I don't know why everyone does it

I tried CMY from my palette and wasn´t able to get real black. That´s why I understood, that in printers are 4 colours - cyan, magenta, yellow and black. I used yellow (PY 14), not lemon yellow. Oranges and reds waren´t so vibrant, but I got beautiful blues, natural greens and browns. Yes, not granulating, but is there outside in the sky any granulation? Maybe in the future I´ll change my mind, but today I prefere colours, that mix well without separating. I am going to test PY 150 instead PY 14 and I´ll see. Thank you for your useful videos. Have a nice day

Oh i forgot to ask, what did you think of that magenta color?

What a weird name for PR122. PR122 is usually Quinacridone Magenta, given the composition of the pigment. It's my favourite magenta and my go to cool red. About granulation, it is not impossible to achieve with non granulating colours. You can buy a special liquid called "granulating medium" that can create wonderful granulation on any non granulating colour.

Cmy ftw!

It seems CMY would be good for florals

I care. I care alot. I care so much. I care *way* too much

I like you so much I watch twice on 2 separate accounts and like twice. You are my RU-vid crack lol. Other account is Rob L. You are the best don't ever change dude..

Firstly, that yellow is too green, unless my screen wrongly calibrated. Secondly "Blue" is not the same color it used to be. Blue was lighter closer to cyan. Why red is called primary traditionally I don't know. Magenta pigments where maybe not available or very expensive. Anyway Cyan, magenta and yellow are the primary subrtactive colours, that are the facts.

I like CMY for my style ..

I do 😢

But Phthalo Blue is also known as Azure and Azure is in between Cyan and Blue so why does Phthalo Blue work as Cyan for you and not Sky Blue.

It never made sense to me why art and printing had different primary colors. I always wondered why there were no cartridges for blue and red. Turns out this is the awnser, CMYK is superior to RBY.