Teal

What color is teal?

The story of teal

Teal is named after a duck small enough to fit in two hands, and named for one stripe on that duck rather than the whole bird.

The bird is the Eurasian teal, one of the smallest dabbling ducks anywhere, 34 to 43 centimeters long and weighing about as much as a full can of soda. From across a pond the drake reads as a plain gray duck with a dark head. Get closer and the head resolves into an iridescent green patch that starts just in front of the eye and sweeps back across the crown, bordered on both edges by a thin line of pale yellow-white. That patch is the entire reason a color exists. English did not borrow the name until surprisingly late: teal was first recorded as a color name in 1917, a decade before the copper phthalocyanine molecule that now supplies most of the pigment was even discovered, and nearly twenty years before anyone could buy it in a tube.

On a screen, teal is #008080, which is R zero, G 128, B 128, or exactly half-strength cyan. That is a color invented by a chart, not a bird-watcher: halve every value of pure cyan and you land close to the duck's stripe by accident. Teal earned a spot among the earliest named web colors and rode along on Windows 95's default desktop, so an entire generation's first memory of the color had nothing to do with ducks. It also had a run as a design fad in the 1990s, when a batch of sports franchises adopted it for their uniforms, presumably because it looked like nothing else on the field.

Here is the part that matters at the easel. Teal sits between blue and green with darkness already built into the idea of it, which is what makes it the easiest color on this site to mix and still look expensive. Straight phthalo blue and phthalo green together give you something closer to swimming-pool paint than open water: too clean, too synthetic, too obviously mixed by a machine. Knock it down with a whisper of black, an earth like burnt sienna, or a speck of red, and it stops looking like a chart value and starts looking like water with weather in it.

Cobalt teal skips the argument entirely. It is a single granulating pigment that already sits at the color, no mixing required, at the price cobalt always charges. I keep both routes going: machine-mixed teal for big, flat washes where I want total control, cobalt teal for anything where I want the paint to do some of the thinking for me. Either way, nobody squeezing a tube labeled teal is getting the duck. They are getting a chart value with better manners, and I have made peace with that.

Pigment facts

These describe the pigment in general. Every brand's tube behaves a little differently, so test yours on scrap paper.

How to mix teal

You will not find a tube that says the true teal on the label, because the name predates the pigments that now do the job. The standard route is phthalo blue and phthalo green, mixed together and then knocked back with a touch of black, an earth like burnt sienna, or a speck of red. Skip the calming step and you get a color that looks like it came out of a printer, not the sea.

The other way in is cobalt teal, a single granulating pigment covered in more detail on the cobalt violet page alongside the rest of the cobalt family. It costs more and will not stain your paper the way phthalo does, which some painters count as a fair trade.

Using teal in watercolor

Reach for teal anywhere water gets deep enough to lose the bottom: open sea, a swimming pool at dusk, the shadow side of a wave. It also earns a place in interiors and still life, anywhere a designer working in the 1990s might have reached for it first.

Wet-on-wet, it makes a convincing deep-water passage in one move. Wet the paper, drop the mix in, and let it settle unevenly rather than smoothing it out; real water is never one flat teal from edge to edge. On dry paper it holds a clean, almost lacquered edge, which suits painted metal and glazed tile better than open water.

It sits well against warm sand colors and against its near-opposite, a burnt orange or a warm pink, which is the fastest way to make a teal look considered rather than picked at random.

One thing I learned the hard way: teal is confident enough to flatten everything around it. Surround it with too many other saturated colors and the whole painting reads as a color chart instead of a place. Give it one quiet neighbor, a warm gray or a sandy beige, and let it do the work alone.

Teal vs turquoise (and navy)

Turquoise is teal with the lights left on. Both sit at the same address on the wheel, between blue and green, but turquoise stays close to the gemstone it is named after: bright, pale, a little chalky. Teal takes the same hue and pulls it down with black or gray until it reads as evening instead of noon. The full story of turquoise, including the Persian mine and the Egyptian fake, lives on its own page: turquoise.

Navy is the other color people reach for by mistake. Navy has no green in it at all, just a blue pushed almost to black. Teal keeps enough green in the mix that it still argues with the blues around it instead of disappearing into them.

If turquoise is a lagoon at noon, teal is the same water after the tide comes in and the light goes gray, and navy is the sky above both of them at midnight.

More color stories

Mel, founder of Tobio'sI make portable watercolor kits and I named the company after my cat. I write these pages for the beginner I used to be, one pigment at a time.