Paint mixing can be a challenge, but with practice and repetition, you’ll start to understand the different characteristics of each color, and how they interact with each other. By careful practice and paying attention to the combinations of colors, you’ll begin to make the perfect color mixture and the daunting past of learning how to mix paint colors will become easy!
How to Mix Paint Colors
As painters, paint mixing is one of the most important parts of any piece of art. The ability to properly mix paint and produce the correct hue, value, and saturation that the painting needs is a critical tool.
Failing to make proper color mixtures in oil paint can lead to value issues and unrealistic paintings. Understanding how to lighten, darken, and make colors more vivid can be the difference between a strong painting and one that falls flat.
Find out how you mix paint colors using these simple tips!
Value, hue, and saturation are all important parts of color paint mixing.
Mixing Mid-Tones Properly
Learning how to mix paint colors can be overwhelming. That is why at Evolve, students begin their journey into paint mixing (after value and edge) in Block 3 , as they learn about color. Using the beautiful Old Holland paints, students start by simply mixing a mid-tone color for each of the color lights in their painting.
In order to mix the proper mid-tone light for each color, students experiment with small batches of paint, until they find the right mixture. In the beginning, this experimentation is necessary to learn how each paint color reacts. Some colors are richly pigmented, like English red, and can completely take over a mixture. Others may need more amounts to be added in order to make any difference.
Students are urged to isolate the color they are trying to mix in their photograph or in their still life box, so they can understand what it really is. They then need to consider the hue, saturation, and value of the color that they see.
Learn how to organize your palette with this blog: Organizing Your Oil Painting Palette Setup.
Using photoshop or a similar color isolating tool is a good way to start to understand the colors you see in photographs.
Hue is simply the color itself, for example, red, green, or perhaps blue. Saturation is how rich, strong, or vivid a color appears. The more colorful a mixture, the more saturated it will be, and less saturation will yield a color that appears grayer.
Value speaks to how light or dark that color is. In the beginning, students only mix colors for their lights and add black to make shadows, keeping it simple. But as they improve, they will mix color shadows just like lights. This is where value comes into play, with students carefully considering the value of the light in order to differentiate between light and shadow.
Once a student understands how to mix those mid-tone colors, they can begin to experiment with lightening and darkening color values to adjust the hue, value, and saturation.
White is not always the right paint choice for lightening color paint mixtures.
Lightening Paint with Color
Most beginner artists will dip immediately into white paint to lighten their paint mixtures. However, white paint doesn’t always lighten colors the best way possible. White paint has a tendency to de-saturate colors, and while they seem lighter, they will look much less colorful.
Choosing a color like Naples yellow or Scheveningen yellow to lighten a paint mixture will yield a more colorful result.
In the photo above, you can see the difference that white and Naples yellow have on a color mixture. In order to keep your paint mixtures well saturated and colorful, reach for a yellow, rather than white paint.
Though it can be helpful while you learn, adding pure black isn’t always the right choice to darken your shadow mixtures.
Ivory Black
The most commonly used black, made from burnt bone (sometimes called bone black). It is semi-transparent, has a moderate tinting strength, and doesn’t overwhelm mixtures. Overall it is a good mixing black, however if you find that it dulls mixtures a bit too much, try chromatic black.
Mars black is a synthetic iron oxide. It is very opaque and has a strong tinting strength, making it a bit overwhelming in color mixtures. It is useful when you want a strong, opaque black straight from the tube (think Franz Kline or the German Expressionists).
Black Spinel
One of the most unique blacks, Black Spinel has a dense texture and dries to a very matte appearance, almost like slate, when no painting mediums are added. It also remains quite neutral. *
*Because it is a series 4 color ($24.95), Gamblin does not include it in their display so we don’t stock it. However, our distributors do, and we’re happy to special order it for any customers that wish to use it. Like all of our in-stock Gamblin oil paints, our members will receive a 25% discount on it. Delivery would be less than 1 week.
Chromatic Black
Developed by Robert Gamblin, Chromatic black is unique to Gamblin.
For some painters, black straight from the tube has been discouraged. As an alternative, many painters choose to mix their own black. Some good examples are Sap green and Alizarin Crimson or Burnt Sienna and Ultramarine Blue. Chromatic Black was developed in the spirit of a mixed black, made by mixing two modern organic colors, Phtalo Emerald (warm green) and Quinacridone Red (cool red). When mixed, these two colors pass right through the middle of the color wheel to produce a rich black, perfect for creating cleaner shades of colors. Because of its transparency, it is the darkest black on the color palette and is ideal for mixing with other transparent colors when you don’t want to lose their transparency.
