[?] Subscribe To This Site

An Artist's color mixing guide to oil paint.

My color mixing guide and a few pointers on setting up your palette.

I almost gave up on developing this color mixing guide because of the availability of so much good information already out here on the web, and in written book form. It’s also one of those subjects where, like the belly button, and opinions, everybody has one!

So without any further delay, please indulge me these few moments as I give you my humble opinions and a few others that do indeed make some sense and will, I believe, give you a better understanding on color mixing.

If you haven’t already, please jump over to the color wheel lesson , as it is a precursor to understanding some of the terms and diagrams of what we're about to discuss.

I also have a short teaser article on color symbolism that I found that gets you prepared for more to come. Check it out here. Color symbolism, what statement are you gonna make with your next painting?

Also, it might be a good idea to check out the meaning of color and the psychology of color too (at some point), so that you’re subconscious will be ruminating about how to set up your own color palette.

Colors have four properties:

Value = refers to the lightness or darkness of a color.
Intensity = how bright or dull it is.
Hue = Hue is just another word for color. Red hue means red color.
Temperature = how close to fire, or ice the color is.

Now about temperature, you should be thinking about keeping a theme for your painting that runs either in the cool or warm temperature range of colors. This will help keep your painting balanced.

Color Mixing Guide Shades and tints

It’s a general practice to tint a color with white, thus making it lighter. And shading a color with black to darken it. But this doesn’t work all of the time. See more details below.

The Masters usually used a very limited palette. This was due to many factors, cost, time in grinding their own, or having apprentices doing this, and availability of the raw compounds or their own previous training or preferences.

In today’s world, access to different oil colors is mind boggling. So where do you start?

Well, if you’ve been following some of my lessons here, and you’ve started a work, you’ll know I begin with an imprimatura, (a coated pre-colored canvas) of a yellow ochre/olive toned canvas. Then the first and second Umber underlayer using burnt umber as the only paint. From here we go into the dead or gray layer which uses a prepared black, white, and 3 to 5 midtones.

Here is your color mixing guide list of paints so far:

My prepared black will have 2 parts Ivory or Mars Black,

1 part Burnt Umber, and

1/8 part Prussian Blue.

You can experiment with making a very deep rich black using just Prussian blue and burnt umber.

For my Imprimatura I use

Prepared Black,

Yellow Ochre,

Titanium White, and a touch of

Prussian Blue

to create an olive hue. The lightness or darkness is depending on the average tonality of the entire piece. This is found by squinting your eyes and getting the average brightness of the largest lit area in the set up.

I have found Flake White, and Zinc White will not cover (not enough opacity) during the dead layer. I have also found that Permalba is a very good blend of Titanium and Zinc white that does cover well in the dead layer.

For my other colors, I use these:

Cadmium Yellow Light

Cadmium Yellow Medium (rarely used)

Cadmium Red Medium (rarely used)

Alizarin Crimson

Phthalo Blue (rarely used)

along with Prussian Blue (already mentioned)

Now remember, from this point on in our color mixing guide, references to the color wheel will be made to the RYB (Mixing Color) Wheel. And not the RGB Visual Color Wheel. You should keep both within your studio, the later being for color schemes and color meaning within your work. color mixing guide, color wheel, RGB color wheel, visual color wheel

color mixing guide, color wheel, RYB color wheel, mixing color wheel

On the left is our Visual Color Wheel, on the right is our Mixing color wheel.

Before we get too far in, you’ll need to start thinking about paint color differently — you must understand that every oil paint manufactured color actually has a main color (the one you see) and another color as part of a filler and blend.

Color manufacturers will not blend us a true blue, a true yellow, or a true red.

Why?

Could be that they wouldn’t stay in business for long, (because of the ability for us to mix all the rest ourselves) or the manufacturing process just makes it impossible to create, thus preventing them with coming up with the perfect combination.

So each of the colors listed above you will find will lean one way or the other towards another color on the Color Wheel.

Color Mixing Guide paint location on the color wheel

color mixing guide, color wheel, paint on color wheel location

Cadmium Yellow Light leans towards the green/blue (actually has a touch of blue paint)

Cadmium Yellow Medium leans towards the orange/red (because it has a touch of red in it)

Cadmium Red Medium leans towards the orange (because it contains yellow)

Alizarin Crimson leans towards the violet/blue

Phthalo Blue leans towards the green

Prussian Blue leans towards the red

Where are your greens?

They are completely mixable from the above.

A very true and intense green can be created using Phthalo Blue (leans green) and Cadmium Yellow Light (leans green).

This green has proven just to intense for my work, and rarely do I see this intense a green in nature, but then again, my eyesight genetically may be different from others and your use of it may be quite satisfactory! I put it out there as something you may want to try. Certainly when you make your color wheel swatch, you will see what to I’m referring.

Is this the best palette? Certainly not. It’s only the palette I use. As I said earlier, there are volumes of books on color theory and color mixing guides. There are some artist’s that use much less, some that use much more. It depends on your level of mixing capability, the style or art, the color scheme you like to work with.

So, how do you mix these colors without getting mud?

How do we lighten or darken a particular color?

What exercise can I do to help in matching colors I see in my subject matter?

Why do I get a green instead of a dark yellow when I mix black with yellow? I thought blue and yellow make green.

Click below to get "the rest of the story" or Part II of my color mixing guide.

The rest of the story on Color Mixing part 2!

Back to Top of the Color mixing guide