Dark red is a hue I often have trouble mixing. Adjacent colors, like brownish brick red or deep violet, are easier, but I struggle with that juicy, velvety, true dark red – think wine, roses, and black cherries. Or for a less poetic-sounding option, skunk cabbage!
Perylene Maroon (PR179) or Naphthamide Maroon (PR171) are obvious choices here, but are there other options? It seems like artists who don’t set aside a dedicated dark red slot on their palette can also mix these shades.
Some artists recommend mixing a bit of blue in with your red. This is an especially common piece of advice given by palette minimalists who work from limited triads. I find this difficult in practice, but maybe I’m just not using the specific right colors. Let’s compare some combinations!
Two-color Mixes
To test various combinations, I made a chart with reds along the top (the columns), and various options for “darkeners” along the side (the rows).
Introduction to the reds:
- PR188 (Napthol Scarlet): Bright scarlet
- PR254 (Pyrrol Red): Bright middle red
- PR264 (Pyrrol Crimson): Darker middle red
- PV19 (Alizarin Crimson Quinacridone): Cool/magenta-leaning red
- PR149 (Perylene Scarlet): Darker scarlet
General thoughts, by darkener:
- Ultramarine Blue: Generally unsatisfying. I couldn’t get dark enough values, and everything looked kind of dusty violet or gray.
- Indanthrone Blue: Easy to get dark violets with cool reds. I like these dark violets, but they’re not exactly dark red. With warm reds they go more neutral but it can look muddy. Contextually they do read as shadowed reds, but I don’t love the hue.
- Payne’s Gray: Similar to IB, skewing things slightly less violet, but overall muddier. Not a favorite.
- Quin Violet (PV19): Converts the scarlets to cool Alizarin Crimson hues which I find attractive, but doesn’t get very dark across the board.
- Naphthamide Maroon (PR171): This is what I’m talking about. Of course, this paint is the color I’m looking for, roughly, so it’s not surprising.
- Perylene Maroon (PR179): Very similar to NM, but less violet-toned; truer dark reds. My personal aesthetic sense is more attracted to the violety ones above, but I recognize that to be subjective.
- Carbazole Violet (PV23): I expected this to be a disaster so I was pleasantly surprised. The mixes with scarlets are kind of muddy but I quite like the mixes with crimsons, which are surprisingly not all that violet.
My favorite two-color mixes are simply variations on my favorite one-color convenience shades – Perylene or Naphthamide Maroon. Maybe this is just a particularly difficult combo to get from a pair? What if I try to some triads?
Three-Color Mixes
My two-color mixes tended toward either brown or violet, depending on whether I added my darkener to a warm or cool red. I could control that balance more by using three colors – a cool bright red, a warm bright red, and a darkener.
For example, by mixing Alizarin Crimson Quinacridone + Perylene Scarlet, I get a deep middle red that’s not quite dark enough; ACQ + Indanthrone Blue is deep violet; Perylene Scarlet + Indanthrone Blue is brownish; but all three together can achieve that blood-red Perylene Violet hue.
The mix of ACQ, PR149, and PB60 at the top left remains my favorite of this page, though the other combos are generally good too! Using Carbazole Violet instead of Indanthrone Blue also worked well. Using TRO instead of PR149 was pretty good, but kept things a bit bronzey. Substituting both reds for brighter/lighter versions (PR122 and PR188) sacrificed some value. Using Phthalo Green and Phthalo Turquoise in the blue place wasn’t too bad, either. Granted, I kept most of these pretty similar to try to pinpoint the effects of subtle changes, but overall I found that having two levers to pull instead of just one made it easier to achieve my desired shade.
Do you use Perylene Maroon or another dark red? If not, what’s your favorite way to mix dark red colors?
EDIT: I have since discovered some nice dark reds that can be mixed with Perylene Red (PR178) + blue or Quinacridone Fuchsia (PR202) + earth.