In my experience lightening a colour with titanium white-zinc oxide paints tends to shift the hue slightly towards blue.

It really only happens strongly with reds that shift to pink, other hues have slight color shifts too when you add white, but they’re nowhere as pronounced, irrelevant shifts imo.

It would be much easier to remember that red shifts to pink, than to start messing with your white. I mean, what happens each time you need a cold highlight? Are you going to modify your warm white every single time? You can buy warm whites, but they’re not very popular.

Not all colors shift hue significantly when adding white – but many do. And it’s not always just a perceived hue shift, often it’s an actual one. Using Photoshop, check the Blick color samples – which show masstone, undertone, and tint.

Most of these hue shifts with white are towards blue, but some are towards yellow. One example: Benzimidazolone Orange PO62 (below). Between masstone and tint there is a significant hue shift toward yellow. Between undertone and tint there is virtually no actual hue shift – but most eyes will perceive the tint as yellower. There are quite a few other counterexamples like this if you take the time to look.

The phenomenon is known as an overtone.

An overtone is a hue shift that is evident when a color is mixed with white. The best example of this that I’ve ever noticed is the mixing of White with Grumbacher Cadmium Orange.

I was measuring Orange with a color-analyzing instrument once, in an attempt to “prove” something or other–I don’t remember just what. Instead, what I discovered was that when White was mixed with Orange, the hue shifted quite drastically, from plotting as “Orange” on the color wheel, to plotting more toward “Red” as increasing amounts of White were added to it.

Of course, it also become more neutral (moved toward the center of the color wheel), because White is neutral, but it also became Redder in its hue.

So, when trying to obtain a lighter version of Orange, the mixing of White with it will not only lighten it, but also turn it to more of a noticeable “pink”, rather than merely a “lighter Orange”. That is a classic example of an overtone!

I’ve known some painters who have questioned the fact that when white is mixed with Burnt Sienna, it becomes “pink”. Probably an overtone, as well.

And, it’s not an optical illusion, nor is it “imagined”. The hue shift is absolutely real.:)

I was just about to start a new thread when I saw this one. This is still fairly new to me but it seems that when I add titanium white to a warm color, it doesn’t just lighten it but also cools it. Why is this and what are any other options?

It doesn’t do this with all colors, it’s just reds turning pink. Yellow, Greens, Blues, they are unaffected by this. What you do to prevent this is just adding some color in the opposite direction of the shift, if you add some yellow to your light red-pink, it turns light red again.

Colors where you can see this is with some burnt sienna (the redder versions), cadmium / pyrrole red, iron oxide red, english red, venetian red, etc. It’s not pigment related, every color in that hue range does it.They turn pink if you add white. I have no idea why, I’m not sure anyone does.The more white you add the more they shift to light pink.

It really doesn’t happen with other colors, whatever shift there is, it is not really noticeable to be relevant (in my opinion).

Regardless of color, think of it this way: Just adding white is rarely the right thing to do. Just adding black is rarely the right thing to do. And, that applies no matter what you are trying to do!

Unless you’re in a hospitals where everything is lighted with 5k light bulbs and walls are bright white.

But yeah, usually highlights aren’t exactly the same hue as the shadows, light sources tend to have a color that paints the world around it. We can tell if it’s hot or cold outside just by looking at a piece of rock. The people who just add white produce boring paintings.

I’ll bet alot you who are claiming that white cools off a color are painting in cool light.

color only exists between light and dark.. Adding white causes the loss of color or greys it out, reduces saturation. Whether the resulting color is “warm or cool” is a result of the color and the light it is in.

Adding white causes the loss of color or greys it out, reduces saturation.

I think you mean chroma, not saturation. Chroma is related to brightness, not saturation.

Whether the resulting color is “warm or cool” is a result of the color and the light it is in.

No. Because this only happens with subtractive paint mixing, not with additive mixing like light spots.

Like Patrick says, hue shifts when adding white are 100% real. It is the most apparent when adding white to red, the shift to pink is very noticeable. It has nothing to do with lighting conditions.

Yellow shifts to green with black.