So I have a blue and yellow highlighter, and I found that by putting one on top of the other I actually have a readable shade of green.
So suppose I could have any three or four highlighters, and I wanted to create the most flexibility for myself considering my limited options. Consider too that after combining blue and yellow to get green, I could then combine green with another color to make…whatever that makes. (as long as I don’t press too hard, letting so much ink out as to smudge the ink or become dark)
So what are my optimal choices? Creating readable colors are preferable. (this may seem easy for some folks, but i’m largely colorblind for anything that isn’t pretty flamboyant and never really learned how to mix or name many colors)
Theoretically, at least, you could make almost any color with three markers - blue, pink and yellow - in highlighters, these colors would be very similar to the cyan, magenta and yellow of four-color printing. About as close to black as you’d be able to get with just the three colors is murky brown.
Realistically, you’ll get just purple, orange, green and a murky brownish greenish ick. At least that’s what I got just now. To really be able to mix colors, you’d need to be able to put down tiny spots of the marker inks, just like an inkjet printer or offset press would do.
Not to mention the fact that when you go over one highlighter with another, you get transferrence of ink onto the tip of the second highlighter, which will tend to discolor subsequent uses.
But you could use this to your advantage if you mix colours by letting one highlighter absorb ink from another. Assuming you have infinite ink in your highlighter and an infinite scratchpad, you could make any colour inside the XYZ triangle of your 3 highlighters.
A few weeks ago, during a boring stretch at work, I created every possible color using my 6 highlighters (pink, purple, blue, green, yellow, orange). Most combinations were an ugly brownish/greenish tone.
There were only 3 useful combinations to come out of the 3-color combination mix: pink/purple/blue, pink/orange/yellow, blue/yellow/green. All the 4-color (fifteen combinations), 5-color (six combinations) and 6-color (one combination) combinations were very ugly.
Using pink, blue, yellow, as mentioned before… You will only get six usable colors: pink, blue, yellow, purple, green, orange.
Adding in other highlighter combinations (purple, orange, green) will only yield more vibrant tones of the same color.
But, if you want to make some nice cube art… go into Excel and create a page of equally sized boxes, and then mix and match colors to your hearts desire. If you want to be especially anal, write down the corresponding combination, and then go back and make a new sheet of just your favorite colors.