To fully understand the color palette more, you may mix the color wheel by only using primary colors. The set has only one yellow (Lemon Yellow) and one primary red (Carmine) so create 2 color wheels to compare mixtures using the two blues (Ultramarine Deep and Phtalo Blue). The middle of the color wheels below are neutral colors that you can achieve.
Vibrant Color Mixing with Acrylic Paint
The EttaVee brand was born out of a need for vibrancy and color in my life. It was winter in Paris, and while Paris is one of my favorite cities in the world it can tend to be a little…gray. Especially in the winter! So I started painting with the vibrant colors that my soul was missing in those dreary months.
Before I dive into more detail about mixing vibrant colors, here’s a super quick color theory overview. The primary colors are the foundational colors for mixing, and the colors that most artists start with. When mixed, the primary colors make secondary colors and together those shades make up the classic colors of the rainbow: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, and Purple.
This visual shows how to mix the primary colors to create secondary colors.
Primary Red + Primary Yellow = Orange
Primary Yellow + Primary Blue = Green
Primary Red + Primary Blue = Purple
There is a lot more that goes into color theory, but those are the basics that you’ll need to know for our purposes in this post!
When EttaVee began during that dreary winter, I broke out my acrylics to paint and I started with the classic primary colors – Primary Red, Primary Yellow, and Primary Blue.
But when I painted with colors mixed from red, yellow, and blue, I noticed that they were lacking the vibrancy and rich tones that I was craving. They turned out to be kind of muddy, so I made it my mission to find acrylics that I could mix to create the vibrant hues I was looking for.
After plenty of experimentation, I’ve found my favorite color combinations for mixing vibrant colors with acrylic paint. In this post I’ll share my favorite color combinations and walk through how you can create a rich and vibrant rainbow with just six paint colors.
If you want to follow along with this tutorial, I’ll share the exact paint colors I use to create vibrant tones in my artwork. But I’d encourage you to always be experimenting and finding your own version of the primary colors that speak to your soul!
My Favorite Primary Colors:
Turquoise Blue
I use Turquoise Blue instead of Primary Blue. It’s dark enough to create beautiful deep shades for cooler colors, without them verging on looking muddy.
Quinacridone Magenta
This is my alternative to Primary Red. This Magenta can still produce beautiful and rich shades, but unlike Primary Red, it helps bring the colors more towards the “jewel tone” space. I use a lot of purples in my work, and primary red can sometimes be a bit too warm and it muddies up the purple. Magenta is a great alternative because it is already mixed with the warmth of the red but incorporates some of the cooler tones as well.
Primary Yellow
I stick with the basics when it comes to yellow. It is bright enough to create vibrant hues and mixed with the magenta and turquoise it produces great results. If I ever need to add more vibrancy to a warm tone, I tend to add a fluorescent color to help make it pop. You’ll hear more about my go-to fluorescent in the next section!
Primary Blue | Matisse Acrylic Paint
Primary Blue is a surprise package for the artist. Primary Yellow and Primary Red are designed to work with it in 3, 4, and 5 color mixing methods and Primary Blue works perfectly for that as expected, but while Primary Yellow and Primary Red work in conventional color mixing scenarios in a way very similar to the pigments near to them on the color chart and so cannot be considered as unique independent colors, Primary Blue is a unique color that is valued by artists using a wide variety of techniques.
Its role as one of the 3 basic primary colors should be examined first since this is the reason for its existence in the first place. While artists often use the term loosely to indicate any kind of yellow, red or blue it is not true that all pigments in those color ranges is equally good at mixing colors. Ultramarine Blue, for example cannot make bright greens since it is too reddish of a blue to do that, although it is well suited to making violets. A golden yellow similarly is not so good for making bright greens but is good for making orange. When a color, however, is exactly in the center of the spectrum hue, a yellow for example that is neither greenish or reddish, it is able to create the widest range of colors. A center of the yellow spectrum yellow can therefore make good greens as well as good oranges. The spectrum centered red makes both orange and violet, and the spectrum centered blue makes both greens and violets. This is the basis of the 4 color printing process in which black is added to the 3 spectrum centered primaries and white is contributed by the white of the paper. For an acrylic painting to follow a similar methodology, white needs to be provided by adding white paint to the mixes since paint is usually applied more thickly than printing ink and covers the white of the ground too efficiently to not use the tube white. For many years printing inks have used a particular shade of Phthalo Blue mixed with a lot of extender to lighten it to the color they call cyan. Matisse has avoided the extenders as they would make the color too transparent to be useful as a paint and have blended the correct shade of Phthalo Blue pigment with white to get this lovely cyan-like color.
Mixing colors with the other two primary colors shows the powerful potential of these colors – it really is possible to reduce your palette down to five colors and yet paint full color pictures. Mixing the Primary Blue with Primary Yellow results in a bright green of great beauty. Mixing Primary Blue with Primary red in front of students often gets comments like “Oh, wow” because the resulting violet is so clean and beautiful. Using these 3 primaries plus black and white is the perfect way for teachers to demonstrate the basic theories of color mixing. It is very simple, but a class can be entranced for hours as they learn how much they can do with so little.
Primary Blue doesn’t need its primary cousins to shine, however. The landscape artist soon discovers that Primary Blue mixed with Australian Sky Blue makes fabulous sky colors. Ocean can also benefit from this color. Tropical seas, especially on the Great Barrier Reef or in the Coral Sea of North Queensland or the Indian Ocean in places like Monkey Mia where the dolphins come to the shore to play with the humans, or in the Timor Sea, or in the Caribbean – all have beautiful turquoise colors in the water. This is seen to great effect in watercolors by Winslow Homer in places like Bermuda. Those turquoise colors can be made by mixing Primary Blue with Cobalt Teal. Even greener turquoises can be made by mixing with Aqua Green Light. These colors are exquisite and closely resemble the sorts of colors in the turquoise gemstone itself.
Mixing Primary Blue with earth colors is another surprise. Transparent Yellow Oxide and Primary Blue make a wide range of greens from bottle green to transparent earthy olives and leaf greens. Transparent Red Oxide with Primary Blue makes a rich warm but greenish black with an ochre undertone. Primary Blue is full of surprises and rewards experimentation with gorgeous colors.
Color Mixing 101
First let’s talk about values of colors. “Value” is the amount of lightness and darkness in a color or pigment while a “tone” is a color or hue plus different amounts of black or gray and “Tint” is a color with varying amounts of white.
Try to paint this using only black paint. In your palette, mix black and a little bit of water. The left-most box should be painting with the richest black. Every time you go a box to the right, simply add a bit of water to your black mixture in your palette. Eventually your last few boxes will be painted with a very diluted gray. Keep the right-most box empty to show the purest white (the white of the paper). This activity is good for knowing your water and paint ratio as well as understanding how to achieve saturated and desaturated applications.
Watercolor painting involves tons of color mixing. A lot of artists can utilise the fewest colors to achieve a vast range of hues, tones, and tints.
Terms to remember:
- Color – a general name that describes how we see light reflecting on an object i.e. red, yellow, blue, green, etc.
- Hue – a specific color name that is identifiable from a synonymous color, shade, or tint i.e. Cinereous Blue, Ultramarine Blue, Prussian Blue, etc.
Note that “Color” and “Hue” are two terms usually interchanged by a lot of people in different practices handling colors.
It is of utter importance that an artist knows very well what his/her palette can achieve. A good, versatile set of colors is able to create a satisfactory amount of colors for painting almost all subject matter. For this article, we are using the 12-color Sennelier Set.
This set has a good selection of colors. The colors are: Burnt Sienna, Ultramarine Deep, Phthalo Blue, Warm Sepia, Lemon Yellow, Carmine, French Vermilion, Alizarin Crimson, Payne’s Grey, Phthalo Green Light, Forest Green, and Dioxazine Purple.
To fully understand the color palette more, you may mix the color wheel by only using primary colors. The set has only one yellow (Lemon Yellow) and one primary red (Carmine) so create 2 color wheels to compare mixtures using the two blues (Ultramarine Deep and Phtalo Blue). The middle of the color wheels below are neutral colors that you can achieve.
Neutrals are created by adding complementary colors (colors that are opposite of each in the color wheel). See below for possible combinations.
These neutral colors are great for shadows and desaturated mixtures for creating realistic paintings. A lot of artists debate about the use of pure black in painting. This is because simply putting pure black in a painting tends to produce a flat looking finish. Using your own mixture of grays is great for creating the illusion of a lustrous shadow or dark areas that have more depth.
The other colors in this paint set can create even more colors for your use. It can be seen that Lemon Yellow added with Ultramarine or Phtalo Blue produce slightly different greens. This smallest shift of color hue makes big differences. French Vermilion when thinly applied on paper almost looks like orang. This means this hue has a yellow bias. See how French Vermilion (a warm red) mixes great with Ultramarine Deep (a warm blue). However, mixing French Vermilion with Phtalo Blue (a cool blue) makes for a neutral mix of violet.
It is important to know about color bias. Colors are always biased towards either side of where they are positioned in the color wheel. A yellow may either have a green/blue bias or an orange/red bias. Using the logic of complementaries combined to make gray or neutrals, adding colors of different color bias produces muddy mixtures. To read more on color bias and purity of colors, see:
To make things easier later on, especially if your are painting outdoors. It is good that the 12 color set of Sennelier has pre-made light and dark greens, browns, a violet, and Payne’s gray to be added to any color for darker tones.
How about you, have you tried mixing out the possibilities of what’s in your palette?
