Watercolour Lesson 3: mixing colours!

So let's mix the colours we need! In the last post I said  that you only need a few colours to start - actually with 3 basic colours you can easily mix all colours as this triangle above shows. 

Just YELLOW, RED and BLUE.

Here I used lemon yellow, alizarin crimson and ultramarin blue.

By varying the quantity of the different colours you vary the tones.

I.e. using more yellow and less blue you get a lighter and brighter green. More blue will give a darker green.

For BROWNS you mix all the 3 colours - but ATTENTION- mixing them in exactly the same proportion might give a dull tone of brown! Excercise by mixing different browns adding more or less of the 3 basic colours.

What about the other colours you have? They will help you to mix different tones: for example the Prussian blue that is a greenish blue will be an excellent base for your greens adding either lemon yellow for spring green or cadmium yellow for moss green. 

If you drop some cadmium red - it is a more orange red, i.e. with some yellow in it - into your green you will get beautiful brown shades.

And so on - mix the colours you have, try them on paper and write down the colours you used. This helps you finding your favourite colour combinations. 

Mixing your own colours you will learn a lot and you will get vivid and interesting colours, not so flat as ready  made colours might be!