Mixes

Mix Your Own: Mission Gold

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I previously explained how to mix your own version of mixed Daniel Smith colors, and now I’d like to do the same for Mission Gold! Recently I happened to be window-shopping their line and saw some good ones that gave me new ideas for cool mixes. That’s cool thing about exploring brands’ commercial mixes – even if you don’t buy the paint, it can inspire your own explorations at home, if you have the component colors.

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Watercolor Triads

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I recently took a Watercolor Triads workshop with Jane Blundell through Art Toolkit, which was an awesome experience because I’ve been following Jane Blundell’s blog and learning about colors from her writing since I started watercolor two years ago. It’s a fantastic resource! Jane has full brand paintouts of colors, mixing advice, color comparisons, just … Read more

Granulating Mixes

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I recently took Nilam Roy’s Watercolor Granulation Techniques class on Skillshare (I’m on my free month trying to decide whether to keep it). The main part of the class was this snowy tree painting, which I don’t think is my best work ever, but I really enjoyed the middle part which just involved swatching mixes from the granulating paints in your collection. It occurs to me that this a homebrew version of making supergranulating paints. Here are mine.

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A Range of Oranges

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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.

Mixed orange color chart

Reds and red-oranges are the rows, and yellows are the columns. My thoughts below…

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Lessons from “Making Color Sing”: Greens, Greens, and More Greens

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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.

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I Refuse to Buy Schmincke’s Supergranulating Paints

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Cobalt Turquoise + Ultramarine VIolet
Schmincke Horadam Cobalt Turquoise (PG50) + Winsor & Newton Ultramarine Violet (PV15) in an Etchr Perfect Sketchbook

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!

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