I remember in elementary school that I was mixing paints and to make grey, and I found that a small quantity of black darkens white super easily whereas even a 50-50 split of black and white leaves an almost black color. Is black paint more potent? Is there some kind of complicated color theory?
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It’s a mistake to think that mixing paint is the same as mixing colors. Paints combined with each other chemically, have varying degrees of [opacity/transparency](https://www.vecteezy.com/vector-art/474551-english-opposite-word-opaque-and-transparent) etc. You can often mix paints to get something in between their colors, but due to their different chemical makeups, the result won’t always be the same as mixing those colors proportionately on say a computer screen. If I mixed all the paint colors of the rainbow together evenly, the result would probably be this grey brown. [If I painted those same colors on a wheel and spun it](https://youtu.be/lil4co0z7QA?t=71) the results are more white
In the case of your black/white mixture, just a little bit of transparency in the white pigment elements allows light to shine through it for an extra chance to be absorbed by the black pigment, which tends to be more opaque. This makes the mixture lean more towards the black end because the black most often wins out with deciding what to do with a light photon that hits it.
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