A tint is an important tool that painters use to adjust the colors in their work. Adding a tint to paint allows an artist to lighten a color without losing its chroma, or intensity. Tinting is useful for creating highlights, adjusting values, and generally giving the painter more control over the colors in their palette. There are several key reasons a painter might want to add a tint to their paints.
Lightening Colors
One of the main uses for tints in painting is to lighten colors without desaturating them. By adding white to a color, the painter can raise the value of the hue while maintaining its vividness. For example, adding a touch of white makes a crimson red lighter while keeping it richly saturated. This helps the artist highlight areas, paint in lighter color values, and create a greater range of shades from each hue.
Adjusting Values
Tinting colors with white is an important way for painters to adjust the value range in their work. Value refers to how light or dark a color is. Using tints allows an artist to create light, medium and dark values of a color. This helps add dimension, contrast, and form to a painting. Lighter tints make an object seem closer, and darker tints make objects recede into space. Skillfully using tints to render values is key for creating the illusion of three-dimensional form on a 2D surface.
Mixing Clean Hues
In painting, colors tend to become darker and more neutral as an artist blends them around the canvas. Repeatedly mixing colors together muddies them. However, adding white as a tint keeps the colors clean and vibrant. Especially when painting wet-on-wet, tinting allows the artist to continually modify colors without overmixing them. This helps maintain the luminous, crisp hues of the original pigments across the painting.
Highlighting
One of the most important uses for tints is creating highlights. In real life, the brightest points on an object catch the light and reflect it back to the eye. Painters replicate this by adding white tints to create highlights. Highlights give a painted surface the illusion of being three dimensional, with light shining on convex forms. Highlights also draw the viewer’s eye and establish the focal point of an artwork. From glimmering reflections on glass to the sheen on metallic surfaces, highlights rely on light tints of color.
Cooling Colors Down
Adding a white tint is an easy way to cool down colors that are too warm. Warm pigments like red, orange and yellow can visually pop forward, appearing to advance toward the viewer. By lightening them with a blue-white tint, painters can make these colors visually recede. This helps create depth and naturalism in a painting. Cooling overly warm colors prevents them from clashing with the overall color harmony of the artwork.
Tinting Flesh Tones
Painting convincing skin relies heavily on tinting. Skin contains countless subtle tints, tones and shades. Lightening skin tone colors with white appropriately captures the colors of light hitting a face or figure. Cool tints suggest shadows and diffuse light, while warm tints reproduce the ruddy glow of life underneath. Mixing convincingly layered tints makes figures seem volumetric and realistic.
Creating Atmospheric Effects
Adding white tints to a color is an easy way to capture certain atmospheric effects in painting. For example, sunny, hazy landscapes full of light atmosphere can be created by tinting all the colors with white. This mimics the effect of sunlight diffusing through moisture in the air. Tinting can also reproduce the soft, glowing effects of light reflected off water, or suggestion predawn light spreading gently across a scene.
Glazing Over Dark Colors
Glazing involves painting thin, transparent layers of color over pre-existing dried paint. Glazing tinted colors over darker passages lightens them while retaining the deep undertones. This technique relies on white-tinted glaze layers to subtly shift colors and values. Glazing is used in oil and acrylic painting to build up luminous depths of color not easily achieved by mixing alone.
Making Colors Opaque
Some paint colors, especially those made with mineral and earth pigments, tend to be more transparent on the canvas. Adding a white opaque tint makes them cover better. Titanium white is very opaque and dense, so tinting colors with it boosts their hiding power. This allows painters to totally cover up underlying layers when desired to erase changes or make corrections.
Preserving Brilliance
The white pigment in tints helps prevent colors from becoming too saturated. Extremely saturated paint mixes end up appearing dark and muddy. By keeping colors lighter with white tinting, the original vibrancy of the pigment is maintained. This results in paintings with jewel-like colors that radiantly pop off the canvas.
Consistency Across Paintings
Painters frequently reuse colors across multiple pieces, trying to recreate consistent hues. However, exact remixing between paintings is nearly impossible. Tinting goes a long way towards maintaining hue consistency. By lightening remixed colors to match an original tinted swatch, artists can get near perfect color replication.
Graduated Tints in Skies
Painting skies often requires gradually shifting between light and dark tints of blue. Adding increasing amounts of white tint to a sky blue paint allows a painter to smoothly transition from the dark blue at the top of the sky to the brighter blue near the horizon. This properly captures the shading and values of atmospheric perspective in the sky.
Tinting for Underpainting
Some artists do an initial tinted underpainting on the canvas before adding layers of color on top. This might involve covering the canvas with thin, dilute tints of burnt sienna or burnt umber. The tinted wash unifies the canvas and makes a mid-tone foundation for subsequent painting. Because the tint is thin and translucent, it subtly influences the end colors without hiding the layers on top.
Conclusion
Tinting paint by adding white is clearly an indispensable technique for any painter. It gives artists flexibility and control over their colors that is simply not achievable through mixing colors alone. From accurately depicting light and shadow to crafting convincing realism, tints offer a powerful tool. Painter’s who master the nuances of tinting can give their work a luminosity and visual richness that brings their subjects to life. Whether used for a delicate highlight or underpainting an entire canvas, the tint is an essential key to the painter’s craft.
