The biggest improvement I ever made in plein air painting was when I threw my green paint in the trash and invested more heavily in yellow and blue.

I can never tell if sinix is currently at a front view or a 3/4s view

*when green is your favorite color-*

Dreaming of a world where we speak in hex for colors

It reminds me of when I was a kid and i got my first "mint" coloured pencil. I was enchanted by it cause everyone called it different names like "blueish green", "greenish blue", "grue" and even just "cyan". I was so freaking fascinated by that brand new color I've never met before...

I am russian, and I do indeed confirm that we have two different words for blue and light blue/cyan. However, we also have a name for the yellow-green, салатовый (pronounced salatoviy) which literally translates to “salad-colour”. It’s pretty interesting

Thanks for that "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared" reference. I'm not sleeping ever again.

Ok green is my favorite color and I feel attacked right now xD

Between Blue and Cyan could be Cerulean, one of the most used colors in Ghibli films. Red and Magenta could be Carmine? Its a colder hue of red, Lots of oil painters prefer it to mix because Pure Red or Cad Red often has a very warm feel and can easily overpower the whole painting.

You are 100% right when it comes to having more color perception based on language. I watched a documentary a long time ago about this remote tribe who does exactly as you describe: Has many names for different greens. They can perceive shades of green that are difficult/near impossible for people using traditional "color" language. However, something else interesting was the tribe did not have a name for other colors, thus they had a difficult time choosing the odd color out. EDIT: Documentary name in comments.

From what I've found, the common names for the mid-hues are yellow-green = chartreuse green-cyan = spring green, sea green, or jade (this one's a bit messy) cyan-blue = azure or sky magenta-red = rose and then obviously orange and purple/violet

"Is it possible that it's something deeper?" when it's Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, the answer is always yes

Sinix: Orange is the most creative color. Me, whose favorite color is brown, which is basically a dull or dark version of orange: I see this as an absolute win!

"we need a name for the color in between yellow and green, there's just too much real estate but there's no definitive word" Sinix it's called Chartruese

I actually recently researched about this for school and one interesting thing I found was that Koreans didn't used to distinguish between Blue and Green. Historically, they used to essentially say green was 'greener green' and blue was 'blue-er green.' You can actually find some older people still calling blue as green (vice versa, gets kinda confusing) here in Korea.

I clicked the video to argue that green is the best color ever, but okay you got a point xD

great video.. thanks Sinix!

I've always called the hue between Red and Magenta: "Fuchsia"

so is this why paint brands have so many weird names they put on the colors

The coolest thing about color names in Russian (and most slavic languages as far as I know) is that it's acceptable to just call midhues by the two colors they stand next to. We basically can just say "green-cyan" to mean a hue between cyan and green. Really useful, not sure if it's made us native speakers better artists though.

tbh between magenta and red would probably be 'pink' or maybe 'rose' (in german there's actually a set color name for rose, called 'rosa' which describes a more reddish, and sometimes desaturated pink. there is also pink in german which is actually more like magenta, a very saturated bubblegum color). I'd probably call the color between cyan and blue something like 'sky'.

This started as a conspiracy theory and turned into one of the most valuable lessons in art I've learned in recent times. Sinix is my favorite art youtuber.

Babies in kindergarten: g-gween Sinix: *teleports behind them* actually that's mint

Green is the best color 😭😭 However I’m very intrigued

As Russian, can confirm that we do have two completely different equally rightful colors for what would be called blue in English (голубой and синий), but on the other hand we call violet (фиолетовый) everything in the range approximately from indigo to magenta. Also, dr. Sapolsky in his Stanford lectures pointed out on the interesting phenomena - your color perception is different depending on where you are from, like what culture you were raised in and how this culture name colors. For example, looking at the same color, some people will confidently say “red” and some will say “orange” with the same confidence.

For me, I like the idea of calling the color between red and magenta- ruby, and the color between blue and cyan - sky. Either way i was actually suprised when i realized how orange is such a small part of the color wheel, yet we recognize it really well. Also a fun fact, people used to call the color blue green.

Green had deeper meanings back than, when after the cold, dark winter the first leaves of spring appeared. Or when we used to live in the forrest and we moved between the leaves, some yellow tints catched our eyes to tell us "hey here is something" while oder red tints yelled for our attention, this is something that is still present in our modern traffic system. Altough I agree with the point that naming hues improves color choices, there is a deep psychological meaning behind them, that goes way back. Un abrazo caballero!

DHMIS 1 1:49 - "Green is not a creative color" Green is Not a Creative Color is a catchphrase by Sketchbook from the first Don't Hug Me I'm Scared. The phrase disparages the color green. In the first Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, the puppets arranged leaves and sticks into their favorite colors (Red Guy likes blue, Duck Guy likes red, and Yellow Guy likes green).

Thank you Sinix! I was looking for "Dont hug me I am scared" and couldnt figure out how the name was again :D

I call that cyan indigo middle part “jean”? It’s one of my faves

green is beautiful color

as someone with green dyed hair idk how to feel about this yet

I think the main reason why we have this pesky colour constancy thing is not so much linguistical, but biological - our vision is mostly there just to make quick sense of the environment around us - notice predators, find food etc. And that's way easier when you can assign and keep the local colours in mind, filtering out the lighting information. And so you get to think of the same green apple in the sun and in the shade as the same object, instead of getting confused about different similar apples appearing and disappearing everywhere. I also think that the pleasure we derive from looking at things (art or the real world) is inextricably linked to how easy it is for our brain to interpret and structure what we see - we love understanding everything around us, and if it's clean and easy to read - it gives us a simple and comfortable pleasure. But if we want a spicier, more exciting kind of visual treat, the best thing is for our brain to have to work hard to figure it out - filling in the blanks, noticing hazy patterns and succeeding in the end - that appeals to our problem solving instincts, to noticing a predator in the nick of time, finding that well-hidden fruit. When thinking about it in these terms, most visual design and colour theories seem to fall into place, falling into one of these two categories - clarification or obfuscation of visual information. I highly recommend watching V S Ramachandran's lectures about Aesthetics from a neurological standpoint if this sounds vaguely interesting - plenty of wild speculation there, but interesting stuff. As for giving more names to colours for our own betterment - that's definitely a good idea - since I've started dabbling in oils, the world of browns has transformed for me from obtuse and dull muck to a beautiful variety of yellow ochres, raw siennas, red ochres and burnt umbers.

In Spanish, we have a word for the color between red and magenta. We call that "vinotinto" which is translated as "red wine" and it's supposed to be the color of red wine lol it's pretty self-explanatory. In Venezuela we are super used to that color as a mid-hue because all of the national sports teams have a "vinotinto" uniform, and we call our national teams the "vinotinto". It's most common to use it to refer to the national soccer team but the basketball team is "vinotinto" as well. And yeah, we just think about it as another color, so much that watching this video was kind of a cultural shock because I never thought that you guys don't really have a word for that color....

Also, in russian there is the word (commonly used) for the color between red and magenta - 'малиновый' (malinovy). Can be translated as 'raspberry color'.

I think the wheel would go as such in a colockwise order beginning with yellow: Yellow, Lime, Mint, Cyan, Azure, Blue, Purple, Magenta, Fuschia, Red and Orange.

this is going straight to my gcse art teacher thanks

This reminds me there was research done on African tribe where they had no word for blue so they couldn't tell it apart because blue and green was in the same category and they had more words for the shade of green.

Really nice content Mr Sinix! Also like your Design Theory videos! Thanks a lot for sharing!

0:47 *VSAUCE* *MOMENT*

yayy you’ve been uploading so much recently!!

this is pretty spot on to the way i've come to think. when i was a young kid and went to live in greece for a year, i noticed that the greeks labelled orange as either red or yellow depending on what it was closest to. there is a name for orange but it's considered a very specific colour, like we might say names like "lavender" or "gamboge". On the other hand, the sky was not blue, it was another word which we can translate as azure. So azure is not a very specific type of blue as in english, but a range of colours.

RIP everyone with green eyes ;.;

I've never been more hype in my life hearing someone say "orange". it's my favorite color and I've always thought it's the best, it just feels like the most colorful color out there.

the color between red and magenta has always been my favorite color, but i just never knew what to call it as a kid. i think this topic is so fascinating ☺️

before watching: but green is my favorite color :( after watching: mint is my favorite color :)

so much content lately, loving it!

B-but I like green 😖 👉🏾👈🏾

I cant pay attention with those luscious locks of hair. Goddam you look like a head and shoulders model

I've been using that "12 colors" naming thing for a few years now. With the addition of "sky" and "pink". And it really does help a tone identifying colors.

No idea why but the title it gave me "don't hug me I'm scared vibes"

i don't know if i understand it completely but this is really cool!! jjust have to watch again a few times

Тем временем реклама: Село зеленое

Your essay was very interesting to listen to and I must admit that I had to reconsider my love for green :D However I don't think the color green itself is a bad color, but I do agree on the word being too vague. As a child, I was taught that the "mint" color was turquoise so I guess I have naturally limited my mental palette with that. I've also tried to name different colors - like "lime" - and learn all those "crimson reds" from "cadmium reds" so my classification-obsessed-mind could rest at ease. Furthermore learning "traditional" names for colors (ultramarine, prussian blue, yellow ocre etc.) is a great way to tell apart different color hues from each other. I have never used oil tube with green color, but I bet those have names as well so why not to apply them? Also do you think that kind of knowledge of differentiating colors by their "traditional name" could help to understand them better and to apply them to digital artworks? As a side note, this video fueled my inspiration to further study and understand the variations of "green" so I can apply it to my own paintings! :D

I'm implementing your suggestion of naming the "mid-tones" instead of using blanket terms into my daily life starting from today. Thanks Sinix!

Your explanation of our ancestors sounds reasonable and your video is a good interpretation of a topic I got my hands on a month ago. I stumble across an interesting book called Soul stirring digital color mastery and in the first chapter they wire up the same problem of lack of language and the colors they want to describe. They also mention the subject of hypocognition (you did that too), which means the lack of words in a language for a particular representation. E.g.: In Russia two different types of blue are known, but not in german. An interesting topic in my opinion. I really recommend looking into this book and thanks for the video, it's a good reminder to take a closer look at the world around us.

9:59 I like referring to magenta-red as "raspberry"

I had always sensitive eyes for colors since i was a child. I hated when my mom called mint "green" or "pink" red. I think you named well these mid colors, that's how I've always called them. I've always called the color between red and magenta "wild rose". And for the color between blue and cyan my suggestion would be "sky" :>

For describing objects it makes perfect sense to use a set group of colours and diversify in the warm range if you have the average RGB vision, since colours tend to be used to specify characteristics about an object in language, such as "oh look at that red car". Languages don't always follow the colours English or most European languages do, the simplest colour terminology is usually one in which value and hue get lumped together so that dark/light are the only distinctions (I like this system the second most, since it teaches the importance of hue distinction and context early on, aswell as underlying values to hues, such as blue being darker than yellow) then many languages add red to this, since red is very prominent and stands out to us a lot, especially given it's role in wounds and blood, not to mention it's the darkest strongly warm colour and so it can be a bit confusing reffering to it as dark or light alone. It goes on like that usually adding grue (green and blue, many languagess lump these two together, even one that I personally speak, Northern Sotho, has the word -tala for both of these) and yellow and then expanding into more nuance. This is a trend though, not a rule, like Himba has what appears to be a cyan, magenta, yellow, black and white system (adjusted to most common enviromental/lighting effects on perception) but which somewhat stumps people for being a bit weird. My favorite system has to be a dark, light, warm and cool contrast. It's the most fundamental things you need to understand to get good colour, even a purple apple still looks near natural if you get the value and temperature compared to the enviroment right, and since the distinction is so little, it makes things more flexible and less categorical, and imo if you have fewer categories it becomes easier to uderstand the myriad of colours/choices there actually are. That's just my 2 cents anyway, some of it is definitely subjective, sorry for the wall of chat xD TL;DR: Languages categorise colours diffrently, less could possibly be more Some links for those interested: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/nbOhjbVk1dexmps.html www.gondwana-collection.com/blog/how-do-namibian-himbas-see-colour

That was nice.I now get why it took me so much time drawing dryads.

Funny thing is - I think we indeed experience colors in a bit different way. First of all - I've never heard "magenta" in russian. I and most people I know always called everything from red to purple "pink" even tho pink is actually desaturated red. Idk why it's like that but to me pink (like cartoony pigs) and magenta are more similar than magenta and violet/purple. Blue/cyan thing is also very confusing. I think "our" green goes a bit further into cyan than you show and "our" blue is really squished between what we call "фиолетовый" and "голубой" which to you are mid colors between Magenta Blue and Cyan. But that might just be me being stupid :)

The key point for me is that each of these hues has a different native VALUE. i.e. they're not interchangeable. This causes a lot of problems when artists try to change the hue of something, only to find that the values are now screwed up.

Kind of interesting that you and I have the same word for "lime" but a different word for "mint" when I see "mint" I call it teal in my brain. The one between Cyan and Blue I read as "Sky" and the one between Magenta and Red I read as "Rose".

interesting video! definitely agree with what you said about how we learnt to view colour incorrectly. took me ages to realise that when painting, the context of the lighting is what defined what colours i used and not the inherent base colour of the object i was painting.

Truly disgusting, that some "people" would do this horrible thing.

Me: Has just spent the past few months expressing how much I love the color green and how it's my current favorite color Thi Video: Exists

This is the best video I've ever seen and I wholeheartedly believe it should be a Ted talk cause everyone needs to see this

My final project in college was actually based on how your language defines the process in which you act upon and how different languages can lead to different mentalities. Wish this video existed then haha

My hair is basically colored the whole green-blue-purple spectrum, so I can just point to a part of my hair when describing colors irl haha.

i name the colours as follows, where i've put intermediate hues in brackets: red (orange) yellow (lemon) green (turquoise) azure (blue) sea-blue (indigo) violet purple (magenta) red nb i use magenta in it's traditional sense of purplish red, not in its printer's ink sense of a kind of hot pink. I also use these abbreviations R O Y L G T Γ B Θ I V Pu M. I use two letters Pu for purple so as not to confuse it with Pi for pink. The greek letters are from the greek words for the colours, but you can substitute A for azure and U for ultramarine if you prefer.

I love these art thought episodes. Please keep them coming. Green is one of my favorite colors.

Sinix, do you have any recommendations on how to practice color? Your advice on digital art for beginners are incredible, helped me so much! It would be lovely if you made something like this but about color😍😍

I’ve always called the colour between cyan and blue depressed blue but I think theirs a better name and the colour between magenta and red a fucken good red. Very creative

Meanwhile blue AND green are both one word in vietnamese

Faline San and the notebook from DHMIS are having a field day with this video

I am an artist currently working in graphic design for just over a year now and honestly it helped a lot with those divisions of color. In graphic design we have a bunch of names for inbetween colors. Most of them are unnofficial names and kinda funny (like panty blue or the spotify green) but it really helped format my brain into thinking of them as seperate colors

I kinda have to agree, we need an official set of color names everyone can agree on. we need names for the midtones of the midtones too haha!

I mean the blue between "Blue" and "Cyan" feels like a Munsell Blue or Cerulean, but that's just me

Hi Sinix ^^, is there any way to find out a guideline of your videos like a list to learn drawing from start to end (learn the fundamentals)? like a way to go on and study to build up the drawing knowlege i hope i am understandable 😅 i love your work ^^, keep on

This reminds me of a pallet I made. One of the most important things to me was a wide variety of skin tones and such. So I didn’t really have much room for blues or greens. There’s like a lime green a deep green, and a dark teal. It works pretty well for me tbh.

AFAIK most vertebrates excluding mammals have 4 different color receptors in their eyes. Mammals lost two of them but then primates gained one again. So we can see more colors than most mammals, but less than most other animals :(

What if we only had, like 2 words for all the colours. Imagine how shit we'd all be at art lul

I feel like I just woke up to a whole new reality. The ammount of things I just realised, is overwhelming.

me Sitting here in a green room with green hair, green eyes and a good amount of green clothes: you wanna fight?

oh my god I thought the video was a joke 😭😭

The title made me low-key offended

It amused me how true some of this discussion points were at least on my personal experience, i used to have a lot of trouble when using colors but got past that when i started to see it as "light" instead.

"Green is not a creative color!" DHMIS Fandom: **scream intensifies**

Real graphic designers know how to recognize colors and spit out the exact hex code

finally, someone that thinks the same, i hate green :c

10:44 "I guess I can't be bothered to name all of these colors." My brain: "Noooooooooo!"

I missed a painting timelapse while you were talking😭😭nice video anyways as always

[Don't hug me I'm scared flashback intensifies]

this simply breakdown in a very smart way the split primary palettes!

your thought is really inspiring, thank you :)

When you named the Lime And Mint I chose the same words. Perfect. I was waiting for the color names between Red and Magenta and between Blue and Cyan.

I find it interesting to see how hues are given more emphasis in text produced in intellectual cultures, like literature (eg poetry and novels) and sometimes analytical non-fiction about the art (eg art analysis, commentary and criticisms, writings about art history, etc).

Thank u so much for making me understand hues better

Thanks Sinix! Great vid.

OMG what if all the tertiary colors were named after food? Think about it, Orange, Lime, Mint... and then the other 3 could be Cornflower, Eggplant, and Beet!