color question

[NaturallyTru]

How do I come up with a ruby red grapefruit color?

I use liquid colorants. I have pink, magenta, peach, red. How many drops per 16oz of wax? They all can be so strong of colors.

Trudi

Edited July 20, 2010 by NaturallyTru

[nmhoneybear]

I just did a ruby-red grapefruit color yesterday. I used three drops of peach and one of red. Looks good to me!

[NaturallyTru]

thank you. I ended up getting impatient and tried peach with pink. Finally came out with an ok color; but had to use way too many pink drops. So next time I'll try peach and red.

[Scented]

Nevermind. I'm going to try to move this to the wax section. Perhaps others have more suggestions.

Edited July 21, 2010 by Scented

[LeahRB]

I discovered (not on purpose) that using an autumn orange chip from CS made the perfect grapefruit color. On their website it looked orange, but not in the wax. I think I used half a chip in 8 oz of wax.

[EricofAZ]

I've been looking into coloring. Every color can be broken down into a computer code of RGB (red/green/blue) or hexidecimal or CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black). There are a few other ways of calculating color.

The CMYK works best for candle making (and printing images on white paper). The reason is because the max value of each color is 100 (not so with the other schemes). In CMYK, always assume that white is 100 for the formula, though you won't necessarily be adding white since the wax is white.

Wax is not really fully white, so that does effect the formula a bit.

There are color pickers and color wheels on the internet that you can get which will provide a CMYK value for the color you choose.

One color that I saw that looked like pink grapefruit (and you would maybe choose something different) was C-0, M-50, Y-50, K-0

So to build that, I would mix even parts of Magenta and Yellow and add very little to the wax (effectively increasing the white component) or a lot (effectively darkening the color as in more saturation but not changing the hue).

The key is to stay with the formula and just add more of it to make it richer (more saturated). Don't add black to darken (K) because that changes the formula which changes the color.

Edited August 15, 2010 by EricofAZ

[Candybee]

Sorry but a color wheel is so much easier. Not everyone is going to have the time or the patience to 'calculate' a color.:rolleyes2