How do you make grey with paint?
Black and white makes a neutral grey, but a grey mixed from two complementary colours is far more interesting on a wall. Blue with orange, or red with green, produces a grey that carries an undertone instead of reading flat and lifeless.
Getting the shade you actually want
This is exactly why paint companies sell dozens of greys that all look different: they are built on different undertones, not different amounts of black. A grey with a blue undertone will read cold and slightly purple in a north-facing room; the same lightness with a yellow undertone reads as greige.
Our grey family shows the measured undertone of each colour, which is the part a swatch card never tells you.
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
- Using black and white and wondering why the result looks lifeless. A grey with an undertone reads better on a wall.
- Ignoring the undertone you have created. A grey mixed from blue and orange behaves very differently in north light than one mixed from red and green.
- Matching a hand-mixed grey later. Buy a manufacturer grey if the room will ever need touching up.
Sources
- Colour theory (subtractive pigment mixing). Primary, secondary and tertiary colour relationships (accessed 2026-08-17).
Also asked as
- How do i make grey paint?
- How do you make grey paint?