How to Mix Vivid Colors

so I want to show you how to mix vivid colors and by that I mean how to mix those really strung oranges Purple's greens yellow red and blue.i you know in this palette that I have here they're already very strong but I just want to show you how to go about mixing any very strong color and how to get there quickly without wasting a lot of time and the other thing is there's a you can mix any color in the world with these five colors this is my essential palette which is these are Geneva colors and with these five colors you can mix any color in the world any you know subtle shade you can you can do do anything because just by bumping it a little bit this way or a little bit that way but if you're talking about really strong bright colors especially blue greens you know there's only so strong of a blue green that you can mix with these three three colors of this ultramarine this yellow and this white and so if you need a really strong blue green you've got to use another color and so here on the side of my palette I have our three of our new colors that we're going to be introducing but they are and they sort of complete this palette they are phthalo blue which is can mix incredibly powerful blue greens but it's a very toxic pigment so I don't like to use it unless I have to but if you need a really strong blue green you need to use a little bit of phthalo and I'll talk about how to go about using that the other color is a cadmium red scarlet which is just a real intense pop orange cadmium red which you can't mix with by mixing these two together and then this is a manganese purple which is just an intense darkish purple that again you can't mix by you by mixing these two so these are the power colors that when you want to really push into an orange or blue green or a you know purple you can boost your color even further with these colors but this you know just to give you an idea when I paint in portraits and I painted portraits with complex backgrounds and all kinds of things you know women with bright red lipstick on and I would say maybe one and I don't know 12 or 15 paintings I would have to resort to pulling out one of these power colors now I'm working from life a lot of work mixing my colors from life matching my colors from life I'm not using oversaturated photographs which a lot of people use you know you you can take a nice picture and then you pull it into your you know photo software you post it on Instagram with a filter and all sudden it's got pop artificial colors so that's so keep that in mind but let's get back to how do we mix bright colors let's just go through a few of these I've got a orange here and this isn't in very intense orange because the lights passing through this rose petal and creating this intense orange in there so the first thing you do when you're mixing the vivid color is overshoot it try to mix the strongest color you can possibly mix and this brush has already been cleaned so it doesn't have any blue in it or any brown in it and end them so I'm trying to mix this very strongest orange I can make and that's going to be pure yellow and pure red and I'm going to attempt to mix the color first with my five colors with the essential palette because if I can mix it with these colors there's no need to get into these power colors so let's just see how far we can go it looks like it's a little more yellow than that the first thing I've got to do is make sure my values right so if I'm targeting this color right in here that's too dark and I need to lighten it up and I'm going to use yellow to lighten it up because I want to keep it over on the orange side of the color wheel and the white is going to is going to you know take away from the intensity of the orange so I'm just going to add yellow and yellow and yellow until I go get my value the same in there that's getting pretty close a little bit more yellow and we're trying to match the value in there and that's getting well it's just just a little bit more yellow so real close but I'll kick my value up just a little bit more by adding even more yellow yellow and white are the two colors that we use to lighten anything with and then the reason I'm using yellow is because I want to keep my intensity of my orange up as high as I possibly can I'm going to attempt to overshoot this color or even see if I can mix it at all and so it looks like I can't quite make my orange as intense as that orange there is in the in the crease of those flower petals so in this case what I'm going to do is I'm going to go over here and grab a little bit of my cadmium yet red scarlet and just boost that color a little bit throwing a little bit more yellow just to keep my value up but by using this cadmium I'm sure that I can get my intensity as strong as I need to it's a little bit lighter on my values a little bit more yellow and I can just if I add more of this red I'm using less of that red and I'm going to be able to mix a stronger orange so in the first thing is is that I'm tempted to mix the very strongest color that I possibly could and even if it wasn't a super intense orange but it was sort of a you know sort of halfway bright orange I would still try to overshoot and try to mix the color stronger than I needed to all right let's see where we are here and this is a laminated photo by the way that's pretty pretty close maybe a little bit more yellow to get the brightness up but by mixing yellow with that cadmium scarlet you can just mix very intense oranges just like that that's it's a pretty good match well let's go let's do a little bit let's just see how strong we can make it if we just had to for the pure yellow with the pure cadmium scarlet and I still got a little bit of this in there but we can really take it to the limit here and mix a color that's an orange it's even stronger than that but certainly is bright so that's how we mix the orange now let's go on to this yellow up in here and see how we mix that one so the first thing is to clean this brush out and just give it a good squeeze and now I'm going into this yellow so you know I really don't want any red in it so I might clean my brush a little bit just a teeny bit of yellow paint kind of work it into the bristles this is after I've given it you know a couple Goods pulls through a paper towel and that's going to really get rid of the red and make it much more saturated with yellow and now I'm going to go back and again we're going to overshoot meaning we're going to try to mix a color that's even brighter than this yellow and as you can see well first of all mine's too bright so I need to make it darker you never want to judge colors of different value there's no point in doing that here's some of this bright yellow and they're the value matches pretty close and as you can see my yellow is too strong it's even stronger yellow than that yellow right there so and looks like there's another little bit maybe right here where the value matches and as you can see my yellows too strong all right so what we'll do now is we'll just take some pure yellow and we're going to have to tone it down just a little bit the opposite of yellow is purple so we're not going to go grab that power purple because we don't need that you these are last resort colors and that's because the handling properties of these five colors are really nice they're not overly intense they're not pigments that are really hard to work with like the blue green it just gets into everything you can't get it out of your brush so just a little bit of purple and that means red and blue and I'm just using a little bit you can it's a lot easier to go easy here and I'm just putting a little bit in my brush which is going to darken it down so if I'm trying to mix that light color now I've got to add white to it because I'm trying to decrease the intensity so I added a little bit of white to keep my value you know correct the same as this little area that I'm trying to mix and then I added a little bit of purple or a little bit of red and a little bit of blue which is the same as purple and it looks like I didn't add enough so we're just now we've overshot the yellow we attempted to make it even stronger than we needed to which we we did and now we're going to turn that yellow down with a little purple and that's as opposed to mixing a dirty color that's not yellow enough because it's got some you know blue in it or some red in it or purple and then you keep adding more and more and more yellow to try to get it to this point it's a lot easier to overshoot it try to make make the color as intense as you can and then dirty it down to match and that's the main lesson here so now as you can see our color is getting real close and I'd say let's see there the values off a little bit but right here where the value matches it looks really close okay so now let's talk about the blue green which is really the hardest color to mix with the essential palette and here I have a piece of glass from the still life this is a jar that has some sort of coloring in the glass and it's coming through is this very intense Bluegreen as you can see so if I had to mix that color and here I've got a brush that has still has some yellow and orange in it and if I wanted to get rid of that the very four I can even begin I need to get rid of all the orange in the brush so I'm just going to take some pure blue and I'm staying away notice from the power blue I'm not just going to go jump into that and mix it I'm going to show you the perfect process that we mix any intense blue green and that is first thing we're going to do is attempt to mix it with just these five colors meaning blue yellow and white there's no red because red is the opposite of green and no brown because there's plenty of red in that burn umber so I'm going to just take some ultramarine and just work my brush into it just to get rid of all that orange that was in my brush so I'm essentially cleaning my brush and just a little bit of paint if I was to do this with mineral spirits it would take you know 15 minutes to clean it well and you'd have to use quite a bit of mineral spirits in the process so I've just pulling my brush through this paper towel and now I'm going to go and get some fresh Bluegreen I could do that again if I really wanted to make sure that my brush was clean I want to only have yellow and blue in my bristles so I'll do that one more time just to make sure my brush and the only time you really got to worry about having clean brushes is when you're mixing a really intense pure color and for all practical for most of the time that means black when I mix my black which is brown in blue I have to clean my brush really well and make sure there's not any milk left in the brush that's going to get into my paint all right so now the brush is clean and we're ready to try to mix strongest blue/green that we can so we're going to take some ultramarine staying away from the power blue for now we're going to take I'm not I want to pick up any of this red so I'm going to get in here where there's only yellow and let's just try to mix this color with this now the first thing is it's going to be too yellowy green that's much more don't even have to try I'm going to if I keep adding more yellow to bring my value up because I'm looking for this brightest blue in there it quickly is becoming too yellow greens compared to that I don't even have to put it on the photo you can see it so I'm stuck with a dilemma I need to keep lighting this up but it's already too yellow and too green so I'm forced to add white and you know if you it's a matter of fact amol blue greens have a fair amount of white in them so now if I add white to it it's it's perhaps too still too yellow compared to this needs to be more blue so I'll add some blue along with the white I'm trying to stay over on the blue-green side of the color wheel and as you can see the limit of this palette the blue greens you really can't mix it it's a it's a certainly a nice blue green and it would work for paintings you know lots of bicycles and and other things street signs and but that's an intense blue green and if I put this on here and compare it down here where the value can see that my mind is not nearly intense enough blue green so I've done my best to mix the blue green I can perhaps that a little more blue a little more white but that's about as strong of a blue green as I can mix that's the one color that this palette you know these are not natural greens typically you can find these types of greens in nature but typically in nature and vegetation and everything it's far more the yellow greens and the Greens that that are far easier to mix but when we're talking about blue greens there's the limit so now what do we do well we need to boost this up in even more that's not a strong enough blue green as you can see so now we're going to only take just a little bit of this power color we don't want a lot just enough and it will darken our color just a little bit so we'll add a little bit of white to go with it but as you can see it very quickly is adding blue green to this color it doesn't take much but I'm going easy it's much easier to just do a little bit a little bit a little bit because this pigment is so strong now let's look at it where the value matches the blue green is still not intense enough this is an incredibly intense blue green and so let's grab some more of that and just even work it in like this and now you can see how strong that pigment is it just takes over but now we're getting closer even more blue is really not much yellow in it some going much more white and blue and there we have it good enough could make it a little more intense if I wanted to but the point is is that you want to first start with your base and try to mix the strongest blue grain you can and then you kick it up as needed with the power color in this case that really was a very intense blue-green so I can show you how to do purples it's a very same process I've got one more photo here with this purple in it and I don't think now I've got this intensive phthalo blue and my brush and it would take quite a bit of time and effort to clean it which is one of the negative things about using taillow but I'm just going to pick up another brush here because I don't want to take the time to clean it right now and now let me mix this purple again I'm not just going to dive into the power purple the manganese we're going to attempt to mix the color first with the essential palette and let's just go for one of these purples down here so it's red blue and white zero yellow zero burn umber and as you can see we're not going to be able to mix nearly as an intensive purple it's pretty close it's almost good enough maybe just a slight bit of a bump with this manganese and maybe a slight bit more maybe a touch of this red and that's close enough I could you know if I wanted to I could go pure manganese and kick it way way up but that's essentially see that's even that's too strong but that's it that's basically how you mix vivid colors just try to mix them the best you can with your essential palette overshoot meaning if you're mixing the green try to mix it as strong as you can with a clean brush and then if you have to you boost your color up with these three additional colors to it and this is a fellow blue cadmium red scarlet and manganese purple but again whenever I paint portraits and I painted you know hundreds of portraits I've almost never had to use these colors so the only time I use phthalo I think or maybe there's a couple times was when somebody lady was wearing a emerald or jewel on her ring and the light was passing through and there was a blue-green color right in the right in the base of the you know ring that she was wearing and then the other time was I painted the lady who had a bright turquoise dress on in there and it was just this intense turquoise that there was no way I was going to mix it without using phthalo but other than that I really don't ever use use these these three colors so I hope that's helpful and learning how to mix vivid colors if you go to draw mix paint calm you can find links to all my free videos if you go to Geneva fine art comm you can find out all about the paint that I use to paint with that I manufacture myself right here in Austin Texas and thank you so much for watching you

Channel: Draw Mix Paint

Views: 355,009

Keywords: mark carder, carder method, oil painting techniques, realism, fine art, learn to paint, how to paint, brushwork, artist, geneva, geneva fine art, geneva fine art supplies, geneva paint, color mixing, limited palette, alla prima, sargent, paint, painting, paintings, painting demo, mix paint, mix color, mix pigment, mixing color, mixing paint, mixing pigment, color theory, color wheel, color paint, color painting, oil paint, vivid color

Id: kutBRWFcTpE

Length: 20min 9sec (1209 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 02 2017