Paint Mixing Tips Automatic translate

The first and probably most difficult skill in any painting technique is color mixing. You will not only need to analyze the colors that you see - you must be able to perceive them as paints. It is easy to say that the sky is blue or that the grass is green, but which blue or green paint from your box do you choose? What other colors should I mix to achieve the effect that you see in the subject?

A lot will come with experience, and, frankly, it will happen after much trial and error. However, it’s useful to know some of the color features of paints to understand what can happen when you mix them.

Primary and complementary colors

Red, blue, and yellow cannot be obtained by mixing other colors, so they are called primary colors. If you mix them in pairs, you get additional colors: green - from a mixture of blue and yellow; purple - from a combination of blue and red; orange - from red and yellow. However, difficulty arises because the primary colors are not absolute. There are three different versions of blue and cyan and two versions of red.

Initial palette

The huge variety of watercolor colors produced by paint manufacturers can confuse a novice artist. How to choose from this abundance and how many colors do you need? In fact, they will not be needed so much, because basically you have to mix paints to get the equivalents of those colors that you see in the real world. Thus, the palette should consist of twelve colors, and even that is a lot. Some of the great watercolors of the past used only three or four colors.

Therefore, before you start mixing additional colors, you need to determine which primary color to choose in order to get the shade that you need. Each color has different deviations towards other colors. For example, of the two red colors in the initial palette, one (cadmium red) is vibrant and slightly yellowish, and the other (pink varnish) deviates toward blue. To get bright complementary colors, you must choose these two primary colors so that they gravitate towards each other. A combination of ultramarine (which tends to red) and pink varnish will produce a good violet color, while ultramarine and cadmium red will not produce such a color. For additional colors to be muted, select primary colors that deviate from each other.

Mixed colors

Complementary color is a mixture of two other colors; when the third one is added, the result is a mixed color. These are the so-called neutral colors - brown, beige and “shade gray”, which play an important role in painting. There is no recipe for mixing these colors, since there are so many ways to achieve this effect, but interesting and varied colors can be created by simply mixing the three primary colors in different proportions.

Why mix?

You may wonder what is the need to mix two complementary colors with a third, when there are so many ready-made green, purple and brown colors. But even if you buy all the paints from the manufacturer, you will rarely find exactly the color that you need. Moreover, mixed colors are more subtle and compelling than purchased, simply because you made them yourself by looking at the item.

There is no need to completely mix paints on a sketch. In the initial palette there are two secondary colors (two green) and two mixed (natural umber and burnt umber), all of them form a good basis for the mixtures, and sometimes they themselves can be used in some places of the picture. We strongly recommend practicing mixing colors and making tables as much as possible, as all this will give you an experience that cannot be replaced.