Painters primaries - Red, Yellow, Blue
When I first learned about color theory way back in some grade school art class, I learned there were three primary colors -- Red, Yellow, and Blue. Let's call these the painter's primaries. Mixing any two together yields various sorts of greens, oranges and purples. Cleverly, these greens, oranges, and purples are called the secondary colors, because they are a mixture of two primaries.
Mixing all three primaries gives tertiary colors. Even if you mix two secondary colors together, you still end up with a tertiary color, because each of the secondaries contained only primary colors to start with. So hue doesn't get any more complicated than tertiary colors. Depending on the skill and the intent of the artist, tertiary colors can be rich, muted, elegant colors, or they can be mud.
Part of the reason for my first experiments with dyes was that I wanted some muted colors. Mauve was very big in those days. But I didn't want mud. Knowing how to tone down a color without producing mud is very useful.
Print shop primaries - Magenta, Yellow, Cyan
Long after my primary school days, my brother in law, who was a printer by trade, informed me that the REAL primaries are Magenta, Yellow and Cyan (aka Turquoise). To get bright Red, he combined Magenta and Yellow. To get Blue, he combined Magenta and Cyan. How confusing! But it is true that if you look at the ink cartridge in your home color printer, you will usually see that there are just three color inks -- Magenta, Yellow, and Cyan.
So, we have a choice of using the painter's primaries (Red, Yellow, Blue) or the print shop primaries (Magenta, Yellow, Cyan). (BTW, I'm in the habit of using the term Turquoise rather than Cyan, so for consistency's sake, I'll try to use that term going forward. I apologize in advance for occasional slips.)
But why choose between the two sets of primaries? And why stop at two? We could also have Red, Yellow and Turquoise. And we can have Magenta, Yellow and Blue. I've found that it's useful to include both the painter's primaries and the print shop primaries to get a full range of colors.
So we end up with four color triangles:
Red Yellow Blue
Red Yellow Turquoise
Magenta Yellow Blue
Magenta Yellow Turquoise
The points of each triangle are the three primaries that we are using for this particular set. The sides of each triangle are the secondary colors, orange, purple and green, but they can vary a lot depending on which primaries are used.
Color Index Name
And that leads us to choosing dyes to use as primaries. Different dye manufacturers have their own names for their dye colors. So what do we mean when we say "Cherry Red" or "Deep Sea Blue"? Luckily, (with leveling acid dyes at least) the formulas for many of the basic colors are out of patent, so there is a generic name called the Color Index name that is the same across manufacturers. Acid Blue 45 is (in theory at least) the same chemical formula whatever manufacturer we buy it from.
The Primaries I use for wool
So where do we start? I was interested in dyeing wool, so I based my choices on suggestions from Linda Knutson's book, Synthetic Dyes for Natural fibers. After some exploration I ordered the following leveling acid dyes from ProChemical.
Acid Red 1 (Prochemical Red 301)
Acid Yellow 17 (Prochemical Yellow 117)
Acid Blue 45 ( Prochemical Blue 445)
Acid Blue 9 (Prochemical Br Blue 409) (aka Turquoise, Cyan)
Acid Violet 7 (Prochemical Magenta 307)
These are the dyes that I've used for my experiments since then, and I find that they work great for wool and other protein fibers I've used. They also work really well on nylon!
Additional Primaries for Silk
Unfortunately, they don't work too well on silk. If I had known then that I would eventually want to dye silk. I would also have bought the following:
Acid Red 73 (Scarlet)
Acid Red 183 (Lemon Yellow)
Acid Blue 7 (Sapphire Blue
Sources
The first set of dyes above are the ones that I'll be using in this blog, at least for the foreseeable future, because I bought 8 oz of each, which is about the size of a small peanut butter jar. Since I am not a production dyer, 8 oz of dye powder lasts a very long time. But you might want to explore. Below are a couple of links to suppliers that many dyers use. Both have a wealth of information for the beginning dyer, including starter kits with their own choice of basic colors and color cards for their dyes.
dharmatrading.com
prochemicalanddye.com
P.S. A largely irrelevant bit of information
By the way, when I took a perception class in college, my professor informed us that the REAL primaries are Red, Green, and Blue. Whoa! That surprised me. But it is because he was talking about mixing different wavelengths of light, not pigments. If you see images like the one below, where combing all three primaries produces white, rather than black/brown/mud, it's because they are combining light waves, not pigments. Since we are combining dyes rather than light waves, it need not concern us here. (So there, Professor Werner!)
