Mixing Paint

We all have a choice of colours, a red, yellow, blue, raw sienna, raw umber, Payne’s grey and lamp black. These make up a limited palette. I suggest you make a record of how these colours mix with each other. Initially only mix two together, the following illustration gives you an idea how to do this and the advantage it will be in the future.

                       

Here we are mixing together French Ultramarine and New Gamboge.

Mix equal amounts of the two colours, this will give us the green shown on the left side. Put the green into two separate compartments. To get the differing shades going to the right, mix into one green pure colour, (New Gamboge). This is done by carefully dipping into your pure colour and mixing into the green. Wash your brush and remove excess water. Dip in again and mix. Paint this new shade next to the pure New Gamboge. Mark it up as +2. Wash and wipe your brush and repeat again into the green. You will find that gradually the colour coming back towards the yellow.

Do the same with the French ultramarine, this time using the initial green in the other compartment. Because this blue is more potent, only 1 mix is required before painting in the new shade, it will quickly come back to blue.

Go through your palette mixing two different colours each time, remember to indicate the colours used and how many dips as in the illustration. What advantage do we get from this exercise. If we want a colour in the future, we can use our book to find the nearest match. Example. From the illustration we wanted a yellowy green the third from the left at the top. How do we get it? 5 times more yellow than blue. 4 dips plus the initial mix = 5.

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