How to MAKE BLACK COLOR – Steps and Techniques

There are three methods to make black color with paint and all of them start from a mixture of colors. We can do this mixture directly with colored paints or we can use colorants or dyes. These methods are also applicable to craft techniques with other materials.

• Make black with primary colors: just mix the three primary colors in equal amounts. These colors are red, yellow, and blue. Learn more about them in this other post about What are the primary colors.
• Make black with complementary colors: every color has its complementary color, which is the opposite on the color wheel. In this case, we can arrive at the pure black color by mixing two complementary colors, such as orange and blue, green and red, or yellow and purple. In this link you can find more information to know what are the complementary colors.
• Make black color with other colors: there are other color mixtures with which we arrive at black, although it may vary slightly in tone. We will achieve an intense black by mixing blue and brown.

This method of knowing how is the black color made it is valid for all types of paints. It can be used for oil, acrylic, plastic paints, etc. Keep in mind that a small variation in the amount of one of the colors in the mix will result in a change in the final black tone.

If we are talking about a craft as popular as plasticine and you do not have black color, you can mix colored clay to make black. Here are a few mix recipes to get to the black:

How to make black modeling clay with 3 colors

There are two possible combinations if you want to use three colors of this material to make black:

• ⅓ of blue with ⅓ of red and a last ⅓ of yellow.
• ⅓ purple with ⅓ orange and ⅓ green.

Once you have the parts of each color, mix them together well together and kneading, until you get a uniform tone of black.

How to make black with 2 colors of plasticine

To make this color with just two colors of clay, you have three possible mixes to choose from:

• ⅔ for purple and ⅓ for yellow.
• ⅔ for green and ⅓ for red.
• ⅔ for orange and ⅓ for blue.

When you have the necessary colors, knead all the parts well until you get the dark color you want. If you like to use this material and want to prepare it at home and learn how to make more colors, we recommend this other oneHOWTO article in which you will learn how to make homemade plasticine.

If we want to dye food in various colors, in stores we have vegetable dyes in a multitude of shades. There are also black colorants, but they are more difficult to come by, so we can mix vegetable coloring of other shades to, thus, arrive at the desired black color.

There are food vegetable dyes in liquid, gel or paste format. Depending on the type of recipe that we are going to prepare, there is one that will be more appropriate than others, it all depends on the consistency of the food. For example, if we are talking about baking and we want to get a black icing for cupcakes, we should not use liquid coloring, because we will surely end up diluting the sugar, regardless of whether it is grain sugar or glaze.

These edible vegetable colorants are quite fragile so both heat and light can cause them to lose their luminosity. That is why whenever dyes are used in baking, it is recommended to keep the prepared food in a cool and dark place.

To achieve the black tone, we will have to mix the edible vegetable dyes, in the same proportions that we used previously for paint and plasticine. It must be taken into account that this colorant is going to be applied to a food that in many cases will be light-colored (flour, butter, milk, eggs), so the mixture will most likely become lighter and perhaps need to add more quantity of colorants, but always in the same proportion. Therefore, for make black with food coloring follow these steps:

1. Take several of the colors of this material that you have on hand, make sure they are those mentioned in the mixes in the first section because that way it will be easier to get to black. For example, you can use yellow, red and blue food coloring, which are basic and very easy to get.
2. Add the drops of each one little by little while you are stirring the base food.
3. If you see that once everything is mixed and with a uniform appearance it is still clear, add more drops of each of the colors.
4. Mix again until you get the black tone you wanted to decorate and apply it to the dish you are preparing.

In case you want to make black color for confectionery without using these colorants, cocoa, which already has a natural dark color, will be very useful to us.

Cocoa powder is very useful for deep black tones. We can use it as if it were another coloring, adding it directly to the dough for cakes, cookies, cakes, etc. To get a black and chocolate-flavored dough, we can melt pure fondant cocoa in a saucepan, adding butter and, once completely melted, add to the dough. We can also use it as a substitute for white icing sugar in recipes that call for the dark tone.

If you don’t want to use cocoa, but instead want to use the sugar dough known as fondant, which is used to cover cakes, pastries, cakes, etc., you can directly buy the black sugar fondant or you can prepare homemade fondant and add vegetable coloring to get the color you want, including black as we have explained before, to decorate your desserts. Here we leave you a recipe to prepare this sweet ingredient in an easy way: How to make homemade fondant with sugar clouds.

If our tips on how to make black have been useful to you, you can read other UNHOWTO articles on how to make other colors.

If you want to read more articles similar to How to make black color, we recommend that you enter our Art and Crafts category.