I’ve mixed greens and oranges, so now it’s time for purples! I made a bunch of different purples from a variety of reds and blues.
Mixes
A Range of Oranges
Swatching out all the greens I can make was useful to me in determining which mixes were promising and which ones I wanted to explore further, so I did the same with oranges! I did these tiny, so they fit on one page.
Reds and red-oranges are the rows, and yellows are the columns. My thoughts below…
Lessons from “Making Color Sing”: Greens, Greens, and More Greens
In previous posts on Jeanne Dobie’s Making Color Sing, I experimented with “mouse colors” and color-mixing. In chapter 3, Dobie focuses on a single color family: green! Green is such an important color for landscapes and has so many different mixable personalities that it’s often the subject of special attention; Shari Blaukopf also has a great spread on greens in Urban Sketching Handbook: Working with Color.
I Refuse to Buy Schmincke’s Supergranulating Paints
Although I like granulation now, I’m not tempted by the sets everyone in my watercolor friends-list seems to be going gaga for: the Schmincke Supergranulating colors. If you take a look at them, they are generally* not new colors, they’re mixes of other granulating colors that Schmincke (and other brands) offer. You can mix your own!
Mix Your Own: Daniel Smith
While I tend to prefer single pigment colors to mixes, it’s no question that there are some beautiful mixes out there! Premixed paints can be great time-savers. I also like that they give me ideas for neat ways to mix my single pigment paints – as long as you can understand the pigment codes on the bottle!
In swatching out the dot cards for Daniel Smith, as well as looking up what pigments each color is made of, I came to recognize pigment codes on sight. Just from looking at the tube, I can easily tell what pigments mixed paints are made of, and what single-pigment colors map to the components, giving me a good idea of how to mix it up myself. It occurred to me that not everyone has this superpower, so I made this handy lookup post!
If you ever wondered “How do I mix…” amongst the mixes in Daniel Smith’s line, look no further!