The problem with saying “blue” is that there is no such thing as a pure “blue” and the same goes for other colors.

pthalo blue and lemon yellow seems to make a teal, Cerulean blue and veridian seem to make a greenish turquoise.

Is any of these what you have in mind?

[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Shades_of_cyan[/url]

Well, those sure aren’t all cyan are they?

I love to play around with mixing colors but for some reason I was totally stumped on where to start for teal and turquoise (other than a “blue” would be involved!!)

If it helps you’re not alone, a lot of us face this kind of thing every now and then when we’re learning; I had a similar problem trying to get the right colour for turquoise jewellery many years back.

This is one of the colour areas where an intermediate hue between blue and green isn’t normally thought of, when in fact cyan is distinct between the two (in spectrums and rainbows too) and either side of it fall a number of colours like turquoise, teal, aquamarine that aren’t that well defined by language. Even with something like the stone turquoise its colour varies across quite a wide range of hues, some being much more blue than others,

Cobalt Teal is fairly brilliant so mixtures that get really close are not as easy as with some other things (like Cerulean Blue for example, which is fairly dull) but tints of Phthalo Blue GS should be brilliant enough as a starting point. Then just add in a touch of yellow until the hue is right.

Another method for reaching a similar range of colours is to mix Titanium White, Phthalo Green BS and French Ultramarine; in this case you start with a blue much more toward violet and pull it back with the green. You could try a comparison mix using the same blue and with yellow instead of the green as an experiment – you can get the same hue exactly, but the colour will be noticeably duller.

If you mix a colour like this and you get a bright result and want to dull it down a bit you can mix in some grey, or a touch of a mixing complement – a reddish earth or a red-orange or orange-red should work.

Einion