Paint Mixing Lesson

One of the important things I learned in class and through experience when mixing paint to create a color is to use one brush to mix with and another brush to paint with.  If you use the same brush to mix as you do to paint, some times you will get streaks of one of the hues on your painting that you do not want.  For instance, if you are mixing red and blue to get purple, the brush may look like it's only purple but you may get a red or a blue streak of paint that is underneath.

It's a little hard to tell but you can see lil streaks of blue in the purple paint.  In this particular painting I didn't want to see any streaks of a main hue, so I just had to keep repainting it.

For this blue canvas, I mixed blue and white and I purposely used the mixing brush to paint the canvas because I wanted to see the different streaks.  I figured if I used this as a sky in the background, it would look more realistic.

Here are two examples of mixing paint and seeing the different colors.  You need to make sure you mix them really well.  Like the orange below, I did not use the mixing brush to paint and some of the red streaked through, it wasn't mixed enough.

There are a few different ways you can mix paint.  You can mix on a pallet with a flat surface or a cupped pallet.  I personally prefer mixing with a cupped pallet because I think you don't waste as much paint and it will mix better.  Below is a picture of me using a waxed paper flat pallet.  My grandmother had some old pads with some of these and I wanted to try them out.

This is the cupped pallet I like to use.  There are 3 different kind of greens in this pallet, I wanted to paint with a grass green and my colors kept coming out evergreen.  I could not understand why.  Then I finally realized it was my blue hue!  I was using cobalt blue and that was giving me the evergreen color when I mixed it with yellow.  I needed to use cerulean blue.  Even though they are both blue, there is a difference.

For instance, this background behind the tree is cobalt blue mixed with white.  Mixing those 2 will give me a color a little closer to a periwinkle.  The canvas below is cerulean blue mixed with white.  Just by looking at the two you can tell there is a difference, even if it is slight, it's there.

Mixing paint I find to be an art all in itself.  It is an enjoyable part of painting.  When you are all done with a piece that has different tones, tints, shades and then you look at the main hues you mixed them with: red, yellow, blue and then added just white and black...it's amazing how many colors you made!
If you ever want to start painting.  I suggest you pick of the 3 hues I just mentioned and then black and white and experience the complete art of painting.  You can buy the colors individually ( brown, orange, purple, etc) but sometimes you won't be able to manipulate them the way you'd like.  Have fun with it!!

xoxo Savannah