We must be able to put paint down quickly without stopping to remix. With watercolor in particular, time is always running out on washes as they dry. Having a firm grasp of the fundamentals actually gives us more freedom to create, not less. This method need not ever get in the way of spontenaity in your painting. This helps to avoid suddenly adding a new, perhaps disharmonious color into your palette partway through the picture. Having a color string which you have tested and dried on paper gives you the advantage of confidence in your selections before you paint. Why? Several good reasons: I like to have a range of color from which to choose-it is so difficult to try and mix exactly the colors I think I will need, and those needs change as I paint. When I am getting ready to paint, I always pre-mix my initial washes in color strings in my palette. It is so very important to have a thorough working knowledge of these colorful grays, because most paintings will be made largely from them. I have also made complementary mixes so you can see those results as well. The resulting band of color illustrates a range of colors which can result from each of these mixes on Arches watercolor paper. In these examples, I have used the pure primaries from my split primary palette and cross-mixed each one into another primary. A color string is basically a graded mix from one pure color to another, often from a warm to a cool, or vice versa. If you are not familiar with the concept of a color string, this article illustrates how to mix those in watercolor and how to paint them on your paper. with Drawing My First Wash from Color StringĪ good approach for your color explorations is to start with the primaries and cross-mix warm and cool versions of each one with the others. cold press and also duplicated it on Yupo polyester.Īrches 140 lb. To illustrate the application of the techniques and principles in this article, I created a watercolor painting on Arches 140 lb. Other colors I like to have: quinacridone rose deep (cool, for clean violets), yellow ochre (cool), indian yellow (magic), cerulean blue (skies) and prussian blue, dioxazine violet and sap green (time savers), burnt umber and burnt sienna (warm earths), horizon blue and lavender (can't mix these). My basic colors are: primary red and alizarin crimson, cadmium yellow medium and cadmium lemon, ultramarine blue and cobalt blue arranged in my palette like a color wheel. I keep more colors in my palette than I might use in any one painting, but overall my palette remains the same year in and out. My palette is a modified "split primary" arrangement-that is, I have a warm and a cool version of each primary color, red, yellow and blue, plus some earth colors and other special colors which I can’t mix from anything else. It will help if you create your color tests in a methodical manner which relates directly to the colors on your palette. Reading about it or hearing someone tell you about it won’t work! But with some guidance, this can be a fun learning experience. The only true way to learn about mixing colors is to experiment and see for yourself which combinations make which colors. In our classes and workshops, color mixing demonstrations are the most popular and always in demand. We must get our color mixes right from the first stroke to the last. However, watercolor painters have a special need to get this skill understood early on precisely because our art relies on clean, not muddy, passages of transparent color, and we cannot make corrections by overpainting. Learning to mix colors is one of the most important and least understood skills a painter must undertake, regardless of medium.
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