Jane's Art Basics - beginner's color mixing

Mixing colors is fun, meditative, and it can be very satisfying. Many color mixing instructions have you making systematic color charts, with small swatches of each color. They look great, they make you feel like you've accomplished something, and they are useful for reference. 

Shades (dark) and tints (light) of Permanent Green Light

Another way to get to know your colors is to choose one color, and mix it with white and colors that are adjacent to it on the color wheel, or "analogous colors". Also mix it with different versions of the same color. In the following video I start with turquoise out of the tube. I mix it with another turquoise (deeper, darker Pthalo Turquoise), as well as white, green, and a couple of yellows. Try this with any color.

You can try out color combinations in your sketchbook in a non-systematic way. Here is a video in which I put together colors in a kind of 'mood board'.

  

If you are just beginning a painting practice, I recommend getting as many paints as you can afford. Start with at least a few high quality paints, such as Golden, and supplement with more budget-friendly paints. Include, if possible, two different versions of each primary color: red, blue, yellow. Here is a little article on Color and Paint, which you can download for reference. It includes color recommendations.

More Color Mixing

I am working on some new downloadable workshops that will be shorter, and they will focus on more bite-sized topics. Color mixing will definitely be one of them, and I might even divide it into two separate workshops.

This video is a sample of what one segment of such a workshop might look like. Each workshop may have twelve to sixteen short segments like this.

Please comment to let me know if there are any particular topic you would like me to address in a workshop that is formatted in this way.

Another Color Mixing Tutorial

This one is about mixing analogous colors, those that are adjacent on the color wheel. I am using the same pigments that I used in the color wheel demonstration:  Napthol Red Medium and Naples Yellow Hue in this case. A standard color wheel often has twelve colors: three primaries, three secondaries, and six tertiary colors (those in between primary and secondary colors).  This is an arbitrary division of colors that gives us a convenient vocabulary.  There are, of course, infinite variations and gradations.  In this demo I simply mix a greater number of gradations between red and yellow than I do in the color wheel.

You can find my new series of technique videos - The Elements of Visual Language -  here.