Let’s talk really quickly about the basics of the Color Wheel. There are 2 color wheels that you should be familiar with. the traditional Red-Yellow-Blue color wheel and the less known Cyan-Magenta-Yellow color wheel.
How to Choose Perfect Acrylic Pouring Color Combinations
Stunning art is created by mastering your technique, but most importantly by choosing the right acrylic pouring color combination. Seriously, you’ve got half the battle won if you know how to choose your colors!
But, if you are like me, with no art background other than some elementary art classes, then you could easily feel overwhelmed when choosing paint colors for your paint pouring projects. And you might have also fallen into the trap of choosing the same colors over and over!
So I made this post to teach you how I choose colors when I a doing a painting and how you can easily do the same. I will teach you the 3 color-hacks that I use to find awesome color palettes!
We will also talk a little bit about color theory. the color wheel, color schemes, and all of that good stuff. I hope that after reading this post you feel empowered and more confident when choosing acrylic pouring color combinations.
Let’s get started with the practical stuff (aka the hacks) and then go into color theory principles so you can understand how to make your own color combos.
3 Color Theory Hacks
Technology is your best friend when it comes to choosing a color combo. You have thousands of color palettes available with just the click of a button.
Hack #1: Pick Colors from a Photo
Picking colors from a nature photograph or any other photograph with stunning colors is one of my favorite color-hacks.
For example, whenever I see a picture that has captivating colors, I save it to my computer for future inspiration. Then I use the Canva color palette generator or Coolors.co image picker to detect the colors in the photograph.
In the following pictures you can see that I uploaded a nature scene photograph to Coolors image picker. Once uploaded, it gave me a 5 color palette. This tool allows you to even export the color palette (as a PDF, image, or SVG file) to your computer for future reference.
Here is how that same picture’s color palette would look like if you used the Canva color palette generator.
As you can see, you might get different color palettes depending on which website you use to detect the photograph’s colors. This is normal because scenery photographs have a blend of multiple different colors. Nonetheless, both palettes will still be beautiful!
In my opinion, Coolors.co is better because it allows you to pick a section of the photograph to create your color palette and allows you to expand your color palette choices.
But try both tools to see which one you like the best!
Hack #2: Look at Premade Color Palettes for Inspiration
Did you know that there are already hundreds of color palettes for you to choose from?
There are dozens of sites that have awesome color combinations. Here’s a few to get you started:
Trending Palettes from Coolors.co
Coolors.co not only works for creating a color palette from a picture, but it also has trending palettes that you can choose from.
Color Palettes With Photo Samples from Colorpalettes.net
Another site is Colorpalettes.net which gets it’s color palettes from pictures. Even though these are not acrylic pouring photographs, you can get a basic idea of how the colors work together by looking at the photograph.
Pre-made Color Combinations on Canva.com
You can even explore color combinations on Canva’s color palettes. Choose from the ones shown on the screen or type in a color, theme, or keyword to find a palette that fits your search description.
Color Combinations from Visme.co
Here’s a great blog post that has 50 Beautiful Color Combinations for inspiration.
The Paint Department at Hardware Stores
Another place to find color palettes is at the paint department in your Hardware store such as Home Depot or Lowe’s.
Paint brands like Behr and Sherwin Williams have plenty of color combos in every shade of color imaginable. These color combos are printed out on cards like the ones shown on the pictures below and can be found on the paint chip wall of the store.
Get a few samples, take them home, and use them to closely match the colors to the colors you have on hand or colors you plan on purchasing. However, with these types of color palettes, you have to be a little careful as some of them have too many colors.
The more colors you mix, the higher the likelihood that you will end up with a muddy looking painting. Even though it is possible to get some beautiful pour paintings by mixing a ton of colors (if you know what you are doing), I recommend that if you are a beginner, you stick with color palettes that have 5 or less colors.
*WARNING- Keep in mind that NOT all of the color palette options and tools mentioned above were created specifically for paint pouring so you will need to adjust the consistency of your paint or layer your colors in a way that will prevent the complimentary colors from mixing too much. Otherwise you will end up with a muddy pour.
To learn more about how to get vibrant colors in fluid art, check out the STOP MAKING MUD course!
Hack #3: Choose Ready-made Color Combos Specific for Acrylic Pouring
If you want color combos that you can download to your phone or computer, or even print out and laminate them for future paint matching and inspiration, then take a look at the options below.
Color Combo Super Mega Pack in PDF Format
If you want a Super Mega Pack of Color Combinations in PDF format, then click here to get 110 color choices for your next painting.
It includes 15 Fail-proof color palettes for beginners, 32 color combos for every season of the year, 15 winter color combos, and 48 color palettes for 8 different colors.
You will need to know a little about color theory for some of these color palettes (except for the Fail-proof color palettes for beginners and the 15 winter color combos) so you know how to layer your colors to get vibrant looking paintings with minimal muddiness.
But this Color Combo Super Mega Pack is a great option for those who just feel overwhelmed when trying to choose a color combination for their next painting.
Color Combos With Actual Paint Pouring Images in PDF Format
These color combos have been tried and tested in actual paint pourings so you can be sure that they will work for you.
They include the color names and hex numbers for each of the colors in the palettes along with pictures of actual paint pourings created with these color palettes.
Color Theory for Acrylic Pouring
The biggest mistake that I see people do is choose a palette that was made to be used for interior design purposes and apply it directly onto their canvas without thinking carefully about the layering and consistency of their paint.
Because, for example, some of the color palettes from the websites referenced above were not made exclusively for acrylic pouring, therefore, they might have a bunch of complimentary colors that look GREAT next to each other but that create yucky muddy looking colors when mixed together if you don’t know how to layer the colors appropriately.
This is where color theory for acrylic pouring comes into play. If you know the basics of color theory, you can take any color palette and use it for paint pouring without the fear of creating muddy looking paintings.
Paint Pouring: Color Theory
Fluid art is also the art of experimenting. Luckily, through years of trial and error, curiosity and a good understanding of the products that I work with, I can help you avoid any bumps in the road on your fluid art journey! In a previous blog, Beginner’s guide to acrylic paint pouring, I briefly talked about color Theory. Understanding how hue, saturation, and luminance work together to create an appealing composition can save you both time and money!
What is luminance? Most often referred to as value, luminance in lay-mans terms is the perceived brightness of a color. While each color has an individual luminance percentage, every color can be lightened or darkened by adjusting hue and saturation, luminance is dependant on both. Refer back to that beautiful sunset sky, if we were to reduce the hue saturation to 0% we end up with a greyscale photo. The photo still has luminance (value) and most likely, even in greyscale, you can still identify what elements were yellow. Yellow is only a small percentage away from white, and while you may have not known that, you do identify yellow as a bright color!
Blue has the least amount of luminance and will appear less bright with 0% saturation.
Why is luminance important in fluid art? Because knowing luminance values allows you to understand the contrast between two colors, allowing you to create an aesthetic composition.
Moving on….
We understand what color is, briefly, but how does one go about choosing colors that look good together in a paint pour? How does an artist achieve harmony by use of multiple colors? While your brain is spinning, I’m going to introduce the wheel. The color wheel.
There are many expansive color wheels available today but for the sake of easy explanations, let’s be simple. Primary colors, mentioned earlier as the most saturated colors, are in the center of our color wheel. Red, blue, and yellow cannot be created by mixing other colors, but when combined in varying amounts, they can produce all of the colors.
Secondary colors, purple, orange, and green are created by mixing equal amounts of primary colors.
Tertiary colors are a combination of primary and secondary colors. Red-orange, yellow-orange, yellow-green, blue-green, blue-violet, and red-violet.
Complimentary colors are exactly as they sound, they compliment each other and are found opposite hues on the color wheel. When used in full saturation, these create a high contrast!
What is your favorite color? Why is it your favorite color? Does it make you feel calm and comforted? Does it make you feel energized and free? Colors can evoke emotion and contribute to the composition by creating contrast, movement, and harmony. Depending on which emotion you’re trying to create you might choose warm colors, cool colors, or an intriguing combination of both.
Warm colors are bold, vivid, and advance in space. In interior design, warm colors are often accents as they can make a space seem smaller. Red, yellow, and orange are considered warm colors. In color psychology, red is said to make someone feel excited and loved! Yellow can convey warmth and energy.
Cool colors are soothing, calm, and recede in space. In interior design, cool colors are used to make a space appear larger. Green, blue, and purple are considered cool colors, In color psychology, blue can convey calmness as well as sadness. Purple can make someone feel mysterious and smart.
My favorite color combinations contrast both warm and cool colors. The use of complementary colors encourages the eye to wander while a softer color gradient to create harmony. You can find some of these color combinations below:
Try them out, let me know how they worked for you!
The Color Wheel
A common tool in the art community is the color wheel. Created by Sir Isaac Newton in 1666, the most basic color wheel can help you determine complementary colors in a variety of ways.
A complementary color is the color on the opposite side of the color wheel from whichever color you choose. In essence, you would select a color, and then draw a straight line from that color to a color directly across from it. Using the color wheel this way will give you two completely different colors that connect harmoniously.
An analogous color scheme uses three neighboring colors on the color wheel to form a harmonious combination. For example, if you chose yellow, you might then choose green and blue to complement it.
A monochromatic color scheme uses two or more different shades of the same color. You might think of black when you think of monochromatic color schemes, but it really applies to any color combination that stays within the same color value. Monochromatic blue, red, and green pours are some of my favorites!
A triadic color scheme uses three different colors that are spaced in the shape of a triangle on the color wheel. Personally, this is one of my favorites because I find color combinations that I never would have thought of myself.
A tetradic scheme uses two adjacent colors and their complementary colors to create a four-color harmony. Using this method, you will get a combination of four colors that complement each other nicely.
Applying Color Theory to Pours
Using the concepts discussed above, you can very effectively plan your pour and predict the results. By understanding the way that primary colors interact with each other, you can avoid the dreaded muddy pour.
A muddy pour is a color combination that accidentally turns out brown, gray, or some other color that you were not expecting (and might not really like). There are a few reasons why your pour might end up muddy:
- Too many colors. Just because you’re using complementary colors doesn’t mean that using a lot of them at once will be successful. Especially if you’re using secondary or tertiary colors, you run the risk of muddied results if you are using more than four colors (excluding white and black).If you’re first starting out, or if you’re getting muddy colors at all, consider scaling back your palette to one or two primary colors and a secondary color to keep things clean.
- Over-swiping, tilting, or manipulating. Excessive paint manipulation can also cause muddiness in a pour, since you are basically mixing the paint together. A good way to avoid this is to remember that you can always add more paint to brighten up particularly dull areas.
By understanding the basics of color theory, you can also predict the outcome of your pour. For example, I love to combine blue, red, and yellow just to watch the rainbow colors that emerge from their mixing; in fact, some of my most successful rainbow pours have come from this combination.
If you plan ahead with your colors both when you’re choosing them and when you’re layering them on the canvas or in your cup, you’ll find that sometimes you can avoid using secondary colors altogether, thus retaining crisp colors and less mud.
Color Theory Rocks!
Understanding color theory is essential for any artist! We want to see what you do with your color theory knowledge. Show us your primary pours, your complementary color pours, and more on the Acrylic Pouring Facebook group.
Sara Wagner is an author and artist from Upstate New York. She is the owner of Studio Blackwater and can typically be found covered in paint, cats, or her two young daughters. You can find her on Facebook and Instagram as @studioblackwater.
