How to make black paint?
Mix the three primaries — red, blue and yellow — in roughly equal parts, then adjust. Mixed black is rarely neutral, and that is usually an advantage: a slightly blue or slightly red black reads richer on a wall than a flat tube black does.
Getting the shade you actually want
Blue with burnt orange, or blue with brown, gives a deeper black than three primaries and is easier to control. Push it blue for a cool black, red for a warm one.
For a wall, a manufacturer's mixed black is almost always the better choice — it is consistent batch to batch, which a hand mix is not, and you will need touch-up paint later that matches.
How we sourced this
This answer is composed from our knowledge base, which holds only what a regulator, a standards body or a manufacturer supports. The sources behind it are listed below with the date we accessed each one. If a claim on this page has no source under it, that is a bug — tell us and we will fix it.
Where a figure is product-specific — coverage, dry time, recoat time, temperature limits — we point you at the manufacturer's technical data sheet rather than printing a general number as though it were a specification. That distinction is the most common error in this trade, and it is the one that costs people a repaint.
Common mistakes
- Expecting a neutral black from three primaries. Mixed black almost always leans, and that is usually an advantage.
- Mixing black for a wall by hand rather than buying it. Batch consistency matters more than the mix on a large surface.
- Using mixed black over a light colour in one coat. Deep colours need two, sometimes three, over a pale base.
Related questions
Sources
- Colour theory (subtractive pigment mixing). Primary, secondary and tertiary colour relationships (accessed 2026-08-17).
Also asked as
- How to make a black paint?
- How to make black in paint?
- How to make black with paint?
- How to make paint black?