Home Forums Explore Subjects Art Journals colour mixing – show some of your favourite paints and what you do with them

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  • #448927
    vhere
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        I thought it would be interesting to see what people’s favourite colour mixes are. Not off the shelf ‘recipes’ but mixes you use – like creating a range of greens, soft neutral colours etc.

        My grandson (5) is fascinated with what colours make when mixed together and was VERY annoyed this week when blue and yellow playdoh didn’t make green.

        I made him a colour mixing book for Christmas and this is the page on greens, which for some reason some people say are difficult, maybe it’s to do with vision and colour perception? or just that they are repeating what they’ve heard?

        Anyway here is one to start off with, because it was for a 5 year old I haven’t quoted brands but they are mostly W&N with some White Nights. A page from the book I made him ………..

        Care to add your favourites? with brand and colour name if you know it?

        #539487
        robertsloan2
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            Burnt Umber and Ultramarine for black. I had a Cotman field box for ages and that didn’t have black in it. But I wanted to do a scroll to enter into an arts competition and had neither any black ink nor any chisel pen. So I flattened the little round brush in the set to get a chisel tip just by shaping it with my fingers, mixed a big puddle of black and did calligraphy with a size 2 or 3 round brush. I actually won the competition. It wasn’t the fanciest scroll – just a green and brown vine border and the text and one fancy capital in red and green, but it got done in an hour on the spot with what I had available. In an 11″ x 14″ bound sketchbook. I had to razor it out to turn it in. I’ll never forget that adventure in mixing.

            My favorite, absolute favorite mixture is Palette Mud.

            No matter what I have available, I’ll wind up with splotches of this and that mixture and when I start dragging them together, unified neutral washes of browns and grays and muted color happen. I can tilt them any direction I want with a little more of this or that. But if I’m doing a painting, the palette mud for that painting is unified. It’ll have the colors of the brighter hues in the painting and that gives a better effect than tube browns and grays.

            I don’t usually paint out mixing charts. I’ve been using my favorites for decades and have come to trust certain pigments to be consistent. Ultramarine especially. It’s actually my good comparison color between brands. I like the Winsor-Newton Primary Triad recommended for beginners: Permanent Rose, Lemon Yellow and Ultramarine because that will give strong clean secondaries. I much prefer having warm-cool primaries, Paynes Grey and Sepia, plus green and violet, maybe two greens and Dioxazine Violet. Sap Green and Pthalo Green Blue Shade are favorites.

            Quinacridone Gold replaced Yellow Ochre in my favorites because it’s clean and transparent. Thinned to yellow it makes a nice bright warm yellow that’s not as opaque as Cadmium so if putting together a small kit I might substitute it for both. Also mixed with Pthalo Green Blue Shade it gives a sap green, so that cuts down the greens that need to be in the box.

            Quinacridone Burnt Orange wound up taking Sienna’s place, same reason, more transparent. I still like the earth colors but if I’m short of space I want the more transparent ones.

            Sadly, I don’t have any mixing charts to post. I tend not to do them any more. I used to in various old journals but it’d take a lot of hunting to find them. I do always paint out a chart of what’s in the set when I get new watercolors but do not know where the lengthy chart of all my Daniel Smith ones is buried. I started that when we moved from Kansas to Arkansas and then left it behind moving to San Francisco, never caught up with it since. Thus a lot of mixing charts also got left behind.

            I like having bright secondaries. I’ve found that Permanent Rose or even Magenta will tend to make bright oranges with bright yellows, but, it’s really hard to get good purples and violets without a strong cool red like Permanent Rose and greens tend to be muted unless I’ve got Lemon Yellow. Some people prefer greens muted. I prefer muting them if I need to but reserve the right to have a strong green all the way along the range.

            Heck, even if a pure full saturation emerald green doesn’t turn up in nature as leaves, it will turn up on that kid’s bike or that trash skip or that billboard. Or it might be the right green for leaves in a high saturation painting. It still ought to be in my hands for when I need it. I do too many flowers, birds, fish and other bright subjects not to have strong violets either. Speaking of which, pure emerald green, spectrum bright green, does turn up on avians all over. My budgie had areas of it on him when I was a teen.

            So much for “you only need olive green to paint nature, gray it from there.”

            I’d add Payne’s Gray to the greens mixing charts though, that’s where some gorgeous dark greens come in. Also oranges with blue black give good greens. Orange-red and blue don’t give violet though, just grays, oh, if I tried for purple and got green gray I’d be spitting and hissing.

            So there’s my mixers and favorite mixtures. I organize differently now, also like to pay attention to transparency, iridescence, granulation, all those other qualities different paints can have. The more the better! And I’ll still wind up using the palette mud as a base.


            Robert A. Sloan, proud member of the Oil Pastel Society
            Site owner, artist and writer of http://www.explore-oil-pastels-with-robert-sloan.com
            blogs: Rob's Art Lessons and Rob's Daily Painting

            #539485
            vhere
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                I use ultramarine and burnt umber for storm clouds sometimes as well as to make black – but more often magenta and viridian make some beautiful translucent, non granulating greys and blacks (whereast the other colours are opaque)

                I do some colour mixing exercises as part of my teaching and do scruffy experiments any time I get new colours that I haven’t tried before

                And yes Pthalo green or Viridian are essential for Cornish seas and those vivid acid spring greens

                For darkest greens I often add alizarin or perylene maroon to a deep green/viridian, it depends how soft I want the colour to be

                #539489
                otherworlder
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                    Oh this is a fun thread! Especially considering I didn’t want to any serious art today, so some quick mixing ended up being super fun.

                    My proudest home brew is the mixture I figured out through many trial and error for Caucasian and Asian skin tone. Transparent pyrrol orange (PO71, DS) base, plus quin rose (PV19, MG) and azo yellow (PY151, MG). For fairer skin, add more quin rose; for Asian skin, more yellow and just the tiniest dab of quin rose, or no quin rose at all. I normally paint a really light flat wash over the entire skin area, and then add a second glaze using the same color but a bit more concentrated, adding form shadow. Then I dark the paint with a dab of dioxazine purple (PV23, MG) for more form shadow. Then it’s just a matter of more layers with more purple in the color mixture. I do the last bit of darks in pure purple or MG’s neutral tint (which is VERY warm).

                    Dioxazine purple is such a great color because you can just continuously add light wash in purple to create shadows. My standard process for blond hair is starting from an azo yellow flat wash, then quin gold (PO49) for the general shape of the hair, and then just keep adding purple. (My example face is a bit rough, and I used a brush way too big for this kind of details, but that’s the idea.)

                    Speaking of black mixtures, I used to do ultramarine-burnt sienna too, but I really have to watch out for granulation in a large area with this mixture, even when I am using MG. So now I gravitate towards transparent pyrrole orange mixtures, especially for illustrations. I make transparent pyrrole orange with Prussian blue the most for a neutral to cool grey-black, and bust out the Mayan dark blue (PB82) when I need a dark neutral black. I have a few different mixtures along with ultramarine-burnt sienna for comparison.

                    #539490
                    otherworlder
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                        So much for “you only need olive green to paint nature, gray it from there.”

                        That’s such an interesting saying, Rob, in an “oh my god really I find that incredulous” way. :lol: What about leaves in sunlight, bamboo in any day light situation, shallow sea in the tropics, etc. Nature is plenty jewel-toned!

                        I will first admit that I have a thing for saturated, nearly garish colors. My landscape probably stops at olive green. :clap:

                        I am also way too lazy for palettes most of the time. Skin tone and grey/blacks are the only thing I mix out on a palette, and the only reason I do so is because I haven’t found a convenience flesh color/black that I liked. (I use MG’s neutral tint, but it’s too violet for many situations, and DS’s lovely moonglow/shadow violet granulate too much for most of my things.) If I am painting a forest scene I usually start with a wash of quin gold or azo green right out of the tube and then just pile colors on top, painting by eye. I don’t really use a palette for landscapes especially not for green scenes :lol:

                        #539486
                        vhere
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                            I’m very right brain/inutuitive so I don’t actually think about palettes when painting – just use thinks instinctively. Teaching taught me to analyse a little how I go about it so that I can pass on what I’ve learnt.

                            A really good book on colour is Jeanne Dobie’s Making Color Sing. I recommend my students to read it.

                            #539488
                            eyepaint
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                                Good ideas!
                                I’ve been working with a trio of DS watercolour sticks – Phthalo Turquoise, Hansa Yellow Medium, and Pyrrol Red. I have to be inventive to get the greens I want (start with yellow, add blue; start with blue, add yellow; glaze layers; add red sometimes)

                                I find I need to have a limited palette to understand colour mixing – it’s better for my brain than having too many choices (more than 3!) :)

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