The Color Mixing Masterclass

[Music] hi everyone and welcome to the ultimate guide to color mixing I'm so excited to bring this lesson to you because with these demonstrations we're going to do you are investing in the most important skill an artist can have that may sound like a big exaggeration when you think of all the different skills an artist needs but an artists greatest asset is their eyes the skill doesn't come from learning all the techniques or all the fancy ways of putting down paint skill is having eyes that are trained to notice more and more distinction to see more subtle distinctions between things so as an artist what you're a professional that is paying attention so artists get the honor to ask questions like what are the exact colors of this sunset that I'm looking at or how would I paint the effect of that road on a rainy day or what is making that person's eyes just seem to glitter and sparkle you as an artist are an investigator and you're trying to solve the mysteries of this amazing visual world around us so how does color mixing improve your artist's eye well you're going to learn to compare colors these two reds you may be looking at are similar to each other but one has more yellow in it or this blue is more vivid compared to this dual looking green and this is how you create every visual effect in the world so whether you're painting an apple or the aurora borealis everything comes down to seeing the differences between colors that are right next to each other I'm excited to be learning this alongside you let's dive in to the ultimate guide to color mixing so to start off let's take a look at our materials list to begin with we have our palette knife and you'll notice that you will not need a brush for anything we're going to do in the upcoming lessons all of your mixing is going to be done with this guy and so if you've never used a palette knife before don't worry I'll teach you the basics of how to use it and by the end of these lessons you will have a lot of experience using this then you're going to need paper towels or rags just something that you can use to clean off the pallet knife with you're gonna need a palette of some sort to mix your paints on doesn't really matter what kind of palette just anything you can use to mix paint and then we've got our paints and so we have three different colors the primary's yellow red and blue and then we're also going to need white and the specific colors I'm using Hansa yellow light naphthol red ultramarine blue the specific color doesn't really matter just make sure you have some kind of yellow red and blue the reason why I specifically use these are because I try to paint with all natural pigments that don't have any toxicity to them so if you're an oil painter you might have cadmium yellow you might have cadmium red cobalt blue something like that and those are absolutely great these are the specific colors I use so that I don't have to use anything that has any toxicity to it alright so let's get color mixing the first thing we're going to do is lay out our paints onto the palette and the way that I lay these out for demonstrations like this is to put them in a triangle shape I like to put red at the top and squeeze out buku paint we're gonna use lots and lots of paint in this demonstration so don't be scared to use this stuff you have to use paint in order to get better at it I know it's scary sometimes when you buy this nice tube of paint that's so expensive maybe you're finally getting into artist grade and away from the cheap stuff but it's critical that you learn to use your materials to the utmost and the only way that you can do that is by squeezing out a lot of paint by wasting paint it's even a little painful for me to squeeze out all of this paint because this is definitely not the first take of this lesson that I've done so I have squeezed a lot of these bad boys out even just to make this video of course I'm going to use the paint that I've already mixed in other takes of this but you got to use your paint you're gonna be glad that you squeezed out a lot of paint at the start of this because what you don't want is to run out and then have to try and mix and match some really weird color it's better to mix too much than too little all right so I've got my primary colors laid out in a triangle and then I've got some white up in the corner that I can pull from as we go through the lessons and a good place to start is to talk about these primary colors we've all heard that the primary colors are red blue and yellow and you've probably heard that they're called primary colors because out of these colors you can mix absolutely any color in the rainbow there's actually more to the definition of primary color than that though the real meaning of a primary color is that these are all colors that you cannot get by mixing other colors so what I'm saying is the color red can't be created by mixing any two colors together so it's a primary color now I would argue that's actually not a hundred percent true but I'm going to save that issue for another very interesting video that I hope you watch so for this our working definition of primary colors is that these guys cannot be created from anything else they're the Primo colors and out of all of these you can make a so by mixing these together what we're gonna end up with is the color wheel and look at me I'm being sparse with my paint already I'm being too cautious really load it down and I hope that you're mixing alongside me through all of these demonstrations all of these lessons I'm going to be mixing in real time that way you can do this next to me because the value of these exercises really really comes by watching and doing it yourself not just watching so a quick discussion on my technique for using the pallet knife this is something that I learned from my mentor is that when you're mixing colors with the pallet knife it's good to point the pallet knife down and kind of push into the paint scoop it up push into the paint scoop it up I think the common way of mixing with a palette knife is just to put the flat part down and kind of swirl it if that works for you that is totally fine but if you're looking for a method to use the pallet knife I would suggest starting with that point it down and use that springy part to push down scoop it up and push it back down mix this yellow and red and what I'm doing right now by mixing these is I'm creating what's called the secondary colors in the color oil the secondary colors are orange green and purple and these are the ones that you get by mixing equal amounts of the primary colors together now when I say equal amounts I don't mean that I'm using exactly the same amount of red and the exactly the same amount of yellow to get orange if I did that because of the nature of paint red would probably just dominate and take over because paints have different strengths to them but what I mean is equal yellowish Ness going into equal reddish nests is going to make the color orange now if you look over here at the purple you'll see that I created a color that's real real dark and it's almost so dark that I can't even really tell what hue is going on so there's a certain method that we can do to judge this color purple to see if it's the one we really like what you can do is you can take a dab of this purple that we mixed together and then take a dab of the white mix those two and then the color that purple is going to actually pop out and then I can take a look at that and say okay well does this purple kind of look like it's right in between the red and the blue and I think that's good enough for our purposes but that's a good way to judge your hue now I think I'm just throwing out the word hue and I want to explain to you what I mean by that when I say hue I mean every color of the rainbow the real strong stark colors red orange yellow those are hues and you'll understand why I use that specific term a little bit later when we get into you what happens when a red starts becoming more D saturated or if it starts looking a little bit more orange colored or something then that definition hue is going to be more valuable so now that we have our color wheel we can talk about the next principle of color mixing which is color temperature each of these colors is either a warm color or a cool color and if I were to draw a line right in between the color wheel we have a line dividing the warm from the cool colors over here you've got your warm colors yellow orange and red and then on the other side you have your cool ones green blue and violet at the very top of each of these wheels from the dividing line you have the warmest and coolest tones so for our purposes orange is the warmest color on the color wheel and directly across from that blue is our coolest color so if we've got a warmest color on this color wheel and a coolest color what that means is that each of these colors is warmer or cooler than the one next to it so for example since red is closer to blue and oranges red is a cooler color we can look here and see that since green is closer to our warm line that green is a warmer color than blue is and that idea of comparing colors warmness or coolness is the principle of color temperature so for our first exercise in color temperature what we're going to do is find the colors that are in between each of these main colors on our color wheel so for example we're gonna find the color that's in between red and purple because this color here is further away from orange that means that this is a cooler red that's the principle of color temperature we have a red that's warm here and then we have a red that's cool and by doing this you're using your eye to compare two colors and see how they're different in terms of temperature now every time that I'm done mixing a color I'm gonna wipe off my palette knife on my rag or my paper towel and the reason I'm doing that is so that I don't contaminate these mixtures if I were to just keep going with mixing this bluish purple color then I might accidentally put some red in it and not get the color that I want so again you'll see that mixing this it's gone SuperDuper dark even darker than this purple that I mixed before so what I'm gonna do to test it out to see if it's the color that I want is take a little bit of it put a little bit of white in there and I can use that to gauge how I think I'm doing with getting the color that I want and I'm happy with that get that out of the way up here and keep going use a lot of paint we're gonna be going even further with these colors so you don't want to find that you don't have enough paint to do more mixtures and as I'm mixing these I'm thinking of color temperature I'm trying to find a color that's right in between the two colors that I'm mixing because I'm mixing blue into this green I'm ending up with a green that is cooler than the main green that we mixed before really wipe it off for when you get to these lighter colors all right now green and yellow you find that green is a pretty strong color compared to yellow so make sure that you've got enough yellow to counteract that all right so I've got a green that is a warmer than the green I had before because this green has moved along the color wheel it's getting closer to orange it's getting closer to the warm colors and I'm gonna squeeze out a little bit more yellow right now because I know I'm gonna need more later yellow and orange together and for our last one orange and red what's your favorite color I find that every time I do a new painting my favorite color changes I find something that just has the coolest bluest purples to it then I get really excited about those colors especially when I start mixing ones with more distinction now when I move on to my next painting and start paying closer attention to all the different types of oranges that I might be able to get then orange might suddenly become my favorite color all right so what we have here is a more developed color wheel and by doing this you are paying closer attention to the specific differences in between these colors you've got your red and you've got your purple but now you're looking and seeing that there are actually many many different colors right in between these two we don't have just one shade of red there's thousands of different Reds that you could mix and so now you're training your eye to see in greater and greater detail the next topic that we're going to discuss is saturated versus D saturated colors we've got the whole rainbow of colors here mixed together but out in nature not every color is as bright as a rainbow in fact 99% of the things you're going to paint are not going to be using any of these colors straight up you would just be too strong so we have the question how do we get these colors look duller or D saturated for example the color brown if you look here the color brown isn't on the color wheel this one's starting to look a little closer to brown but there is no true brown on here and the way that you get colors like Browns or like Gray's mimicking the color gold literally almost any color out there is by desaturating these colors and to do that we use the concept of complementary colors so a complementary color is the color that's exactly opposite of a color on the wheel so for the color red it's complementary color is green and if I wanted to take red and start doling it down what I would do is take that color red and then mix its complement into it you'll see that this red doesn't quite have the same sort of sparkle or vividness as the first red you can see it even more as you start mixing more green into it now we've got a red that is d saturated we've neutralized this red by mixing the complementary color into it and so our next exercise we're going to create a circle of D saturated colors so next we'll go into this red orange and then we're going to mix the greenish blue into it to neutralize when you're painting most of the colors you use you're going to want to be neutralised colors and the reason for that is because all of us want our paintings to stand out to people but when everything stands out then nothing stands out all of these colors have a contrast you've heard of contrast probably in terms of like black and white if something has a lot of really strong white and really strong black and it's got a lot of contrast but there's contrast to colors as well so if our paintings say some oranges on a table or something like that then for the table for the shadow shape of the orange for most of the painting I'm going to want to use colors that are neutralized that way when I get to the orange and the light that's when I pull out my big guns and start using straight-up orange and it'll make it stand out and just sparkle in amazing ways I want to talk about the idea of pre mixing your palate when you're starting a painting versus doing a painting and just mixing as you go along obviously different painters do different things but I think the value of pre mixing is number one you get better and mixing which means you get better at finding the actual colors that you want to use but also you're going to be mixing anyways so if you get most of your mixing done at the beginning then you'll have far less to do later see I made a big whoops and this and I forgot how strong that red was so I'm gonna put this over here because it's a little bit truer to that every paint has its own power to it sometimes red can be very overpowering color there we go well it's a little better at least now our green in our red this time from the other side and there's a spectrum here too if I took this red and put a little bit of green and then more green and then more green and then a lot of green well you'd see is it would start moving from dull red to even duller red and then once it passes the center it'd start looking more green and you'll be a dual grain that starts getting more and more vivid and that's the inside of the color wheel the stuff on the outside is real strong stuff on the inside it's less vibrant and so if you look here you can see the spectrum of brownish colors that's how we get our Browns again neutralized blue here by mixing its complement orange I look at that under mixed I didn't make enough orange so I'm gonna have to make a little bit more that's why it's great to use as much pain at the beginning as you can because you're gonna use it now the difficulty is what this home should be as close as possible to the first one that I mixed that's pretty tricky to do but we'll just have to go with that we've got our let's see blueish purple and then finally purple compliment to purple is Yeller all right so now we have a lovely mix of neutralized tones our browns I told you these were browns and grays and that's because when you neutralize a warm tone what you end up is with is browns when you neutralize a cooler tone you end up with Gray's and you could really tell that once I really neutralize the color then perhaps lighten it you'll start seeing how gray it looks so for example let's take a good bit of blue bitter orange don't lighten that up see how great that looks compared to these bowler colors on the outside of the circle the next part of our color mixing lesson is about how to darken and lighten colors and with learning how to darken and lighten we get the final step that we need to access every single color out there the first trick that really opened up this whole new world for us was to learn how to neutralize colors because almost every color in the world is a neutral color and so the final step then is with every one of these colors they can go either darker or lighter and with that we can get every single color out there so the artists terminology for a colors darkness or lightness is its value the color black has the lowest of value and the color white has the highest so for starters let's look at actually how to mix the color black now like I said in the beginning of our lessons with just the primary colors we can mix absolutely any color out there and that includes the color black I'm going to squeeze out a little bit more yellow I'm running through that yellow like a bad habit alright so the color black is an equal mixture of all three primary colors red yellow and blue and remember when I say equal mixture I don't mean an equal amount necessarily I mean an equal amount of redness yellowness and blueness so if we mix all of these guys together we get something that starts looking like black and I'll need to test this out again we're going to use our old trick of putting a little bit to the side and then mixing some white into it and if I mix a good black this should look gray totally totally neutralized and that's looking purple to me maybe even a little reddish so how would i neutralize the red and purple tones in this well I'm going to add more of whatever primary color is furthest away and yellow is the complementary color of purple so I'll get that purple out of the way and let's put more yellow into this mixture and we should get something that's closer to black when we do our next test all right so let's test this out again and a little bit of white okay and to me that's still looking purple purple reddish so we're going to want to go further let's get a good hunk more yellow in there and I'm also going to put a little bit more blue in there do another test all right and that's starting to look more gray to me and you know I still see what looks like almost an orange tint to this black so if I want to neutralize the orange I would mix more blue in so that probably means I added too much yellow there are some blue in here a little more in hopefully from this I'll get a good black there we go that's more like gray okay I'm pretty happy with that so we got black by mixing the three primary colors together and we would consider black to be in the very center of the color wheel because it's a totally neutralized color it's as neutral as neutral is neutral say that three times fast all right so we talked about how black has the lowest value and white has the highest value but every single one of these colors has a value to it and if you were to take a snapshot of this put it on some fancy mode that puts it in black and white you'd see that some of these colors are lighter than others and others are darker so every single color has a value and when you change the value of a color you're making a totally brand new color red is a great example of this if we take some red and then we had white to it that raises its value turns it into a lighter color and from that we get the color pink so we've changed the value of a color and that's gotten us an entirely new color that we can use to paint so for the next exercise let's take all of the hues around our color wheel and we're going to add white to it and make what's called a tint tint is when you add white to a color and make it lighter and we still want to practice careful seeing when we do this so what we want to do is we want to try and get each of these tints the exact same value so my yellow tint to be the same as my red tint the same as my blue tint all the way around it will put these tints on the outside of our circle start off by using a pretty light touch when you're adding white because depending on which color you're using white can overpower things pretty quickly Oh need too much to keep this the same value as the others and as we're doing these tints this is a good time to do a little posture check we've been doing a lot of color mixing and gali when artists start really paying attention to something they start hunching they slouch and that can do a lot of damage over your body when you're devoting hours and hours to a painting or something your arms and your back our precious precious precious and if you're a professional painter then your arms and your back are you know literally your life so pays every once in a while even set a timer for this just make sure that you've got good posture sit up straight try not to Crane your neck too much over what you're making and your body will really thank you for that after you've been doing art for three hours in one day six hours in one day man that can really add up now some of these colors when you make it into a tent you'll see that the tent is actually even more vivid than the original color and that's really the case with these dark colors put a little bit of white in and they can really shine and the opposite can happen when you start adding too much white you may have heard people complain about painting looking chalky and what chalky is is when there's so much white in there that the white has literally robbed all the color out of the painting that's one of the things about mixing colors is whenever you mix anything it's going to be more dull than the color you started with that's just unfortunately one of the limitations of paint throw things together and the result was always more dull than the original thing and so a chalky painting is one there's been so much white added that's stripped out all the color I'll give you a little example of that let's say with let's say what this blue because we have such a lovely powerful vivid blue color here but let's add a whole bunch of white and you'll see that we've lost a lot of the vibrance of the color because of all of this white that we've added it's kind of tricky when you know you might see some really bright vibrant color out there in the world and you just can't match it with paint paint unfortunately has limitations that you don't see with I don't know if you're looking at a television set or something like that you know the TV has these bright LEDs and they can recreate pretty much any color that you see in the world but pain on the other hand is subtractive color so paint reflects light and that's the only reason that we can see these colors is because these materials on the paint are reflecting certain spectrums of color back out at us but that means that you know unlike I don't know the lightness of the Sun when you look at the Sun it's so bright that it hurts your eyes but even if we take pure white we can't make a white light that's so bright that it hurts our eyes that was something that a haunted van Gogh he really wanted to mix sunlight and he just couldn't get it because of the limitations of paint but there are different things that we can do to overcome these limitations and get closer to the goal that we want so one of the things that we can do to to get the color we're trying to get is we can look to other tubes of paint so we got a whole bunch of really beautiful colors here using just red blue and yellow but with these mixtures I don't know take a take a look at this purple for example with the tints that I've made of the purple I think you can imagine a purple that's a lot more vivid than that so what I can do is I can take a tube of actual purple so I've got here dioxygen purple this is really good for the secondary colors because as I said a moment ago whenever you mix two colors together it's gonna get more dull so these secondary colors orange green purple these can be kind of prone to losing some of their vividness just because they're mixed colors so I've got a little dab of this dioxygen purple here I'm gonna add white to it just so you can I don't know see the hue and bam see uh you see how that Purple's got a lot more pop vividness to it than these mixed purples which are like you know honestly they almost look kind of grey compared to a pure purple so that's one thing that you can use to to kind of get the color that you really want to get but I said that there's a couple ways that you can handle the fact that you can't mix every single color out there in the world with just you know primary colors and the other thing you can do is you can say well I can't get every single color out there but I'm going to work within the restraints of a limited palette sometimes working with limitations is number one a good mode for inspiration for example you might look at the art of poetry poetry is literally limitations you're saying I'm only going to end lines in a rhyme or every single line is going to have a certain cadence so those things that make poetry unique and different from prose is um you know what makes it shine and the same thing can be the case with a limited palette you know using only certain colors together can create a certain uniformity between all the colors and then you consider like well if I just wanted to do a painting with only bright colors then that doesn't leave room for something to really stand out so both of those options are great options if there's just a color you want to get and you can't get it by mixing by all means there's no rules to this by the by the color paint that you want but for practicing there is nothing like using a limited palette because it forces you to understand where purple comes from and how to change purple into something that looks more red that looks D saturated and to show you what's possible with a limited palette 95% of the paintings that I make are done with just yellow red and blue and and of course white and the number one thing that people say when they look at my art is that it's really colorful so the limitations aren't that great and sometimes a little bit of limitation can be good inspiration okay so we've gone around and made tints of all of our different hues so we've practiced going lighter but we also have to ask the question how do we make a color darker now a lot of these mixtures you'll notice actually are very dark so the answer a lot of times to getting a darker color is by mixing primaries together see the super dark purple was made by just mixing this red and this blue together and often times we're not going to need a color that's much darker than that in fact it's almost impossible to go darker than that but same we're talking about I don't know our tint right here of yellow orange with a bunch of white mixed in say we want to make that color darker I think most people would assume that to go dark you add black to it but that's actually not what we want to do and the reason for that is think about what black is black is red blue and yellow so if I want to make a darker version of this yellowish orange do I want to add red blue and yellow to it what will happen then is that this color will not only get darker but it'll lose almost all of its vibrancy because red and blue mix together is purple which is you know basically the complementary color to this so we'll end up with a pretty yucky Brown pretty quick if we do that so what our option is then is to make a color darker we want to mix in a color that's as close as possible to the color we have and a color that is darker in value than the one we're looking at so remember every single one of these colors has its own value and value as well we're changing when we want to make something dark so we're already looking at a darker color of this mixture right here is literally a darker version of this light yellow orange so if we wanted to go darker than this what we can do is we could mix some yellow and some orange into it and take a look here because it's orange is a darker value by far and then oops I was pulling from the tip put some yellow and we're gonna need way more yellow than that see my orange mixture from earlier is nothing even close to the one I had before that's giving me trouble now so anyways it's not perfect but there we go we have a darker version of this yellow orange and what we did to do that is we took colors that were as close as possible to it and had lower values and we mix those in so I just want to say one more thing about lightening colors before we leave this section of the lessons and that's um we talked about how lightning we obviously added white to make all of these tints here but sometimes adding white isn't always the best way to do things the reason for that is because as we've seen mixing white in can really pull a lot of the color out of it and another thing about adding white is that it actually pulls your mixture blue a little bit which another way to express it in our language is that white cools down the color moves it more towards this side of things so when you're mixing a lighter color you just need something that has a lighter value and there are actually cases where sometimes you may want to use a little bit of yellow in addition to white in order to preserve some of the warmth of the colors so a good example of that would be with our greens let's take a pure green and see how with this tint that I've created of it it does look a little bluish at least to me I don't know if you can see that on camera but to me it looks a little bluish so if I wanted a light green that was more true to actually light green I could take white and let's take a tint of this yellow as well mix those together and then see how that green is a little bit warmer than that blue you could say that this warmer green might be a little bit of a truer version of what this would actually look like if it were lighter a little bit more white into that to you there we go so that's just another thing to know when you're lightening you're putting in any color that has a higher value and that's not just white in some cases yellow might be a good choice that's the case with red too sometimes mixing in yellow instead of white can keep the red from going as chalky as you lighten it up so looking here we have a whole palette of colors to choose from just from the primary colors that we started with we've got our hues right here going all around and then we have D saturated browns and grays and then we have tints of our hues on the outside this is a fantastic starting point for making a painting these can be great guideposts to already starting pretty close to the color that you're trying to match now we did all of this mixing as exercises but I would suggest doing mixing like this before every painting that you do especially these hues and the tints maybe these d saturated colors might be overkill or maybe not maybe that'll be helpful for you to to see some dual colors to start off with but mixing like this is a great way to start off a painting and one of the great things about using a lot of paint to mix is that you can do this mixing and then maybe do three paintings of the same subject and then all that mixing time is taken care of just once and you have three paintings that you cannot get out so now that we've gone through all of these color mixing principles it's time to put them to action and do some color matching so I have three subjects and I'm going to try to match the color of those subjects using the principles of color matching with color matching there's three steps that I'm going to take and I'll be cycling through them until I get the color that I want so step one I'm going to try to match the hue of the subject so that's the color of the rainbow that it's closest to next I'm going to try to match the saturation which is the vividness or dullness of the item and then finally I'm going to try to match the value the lightness or darkness so my first subject is going to be this creamy peanut butter and I want to match the peanut butter color so that's what I'm going for so step one of this is to look at this and try to decide what color of the rainbow is that closest to it's obviously a brown and I'm gonna say it's kind of a yellowish orangish brown so just start off we'll get a yellowish orange Eshoo put that in here at this point it doesn't look anything like that at all but let's start neutralizing this and we'll see if we can't get closer to the actual color so we want to look for the compliment to yellowish orange and the compliment is bluish purple so our bluish purple is right here I'll put a little bit in there and try and neutralize this color yeah that's already getting us a lot closer you can test it by holding up your palette knife to the subject that you're painting and ideally you want those to be in kind of the same light as each other so here with our tests let's see looks like I've got the rainbow color about right and looks like I've got the lightness or darkness just about right - but it looks like right now my mixture might be too vivid in color so that means that I'm going to want to neutralize some more take some more blue purple now note that whenever I'm adding blue purple in I'm changing the value a little bit to making it darker so I might need to compensate for that later to hold this up and look it's already too dark now so let's add some white and let's do our color check so it looks like our mixture is a little bit too green and if you want it to look less green then we want to mix in the warm spectrum of colors into that so let's take a little bit more orange put that into our mixture compare and we're getting pretty close I think it's still a little bit too green though so let's take our tint of the orange that way we're not going to change the value as much because we're mixing orange and white together do a comparison and oh that looks pretty dang close to me so we followed three steps to get this color the hue the saturation and the value moving on to our next subject I don't mean to brag but I have been working out a lot lately so I thought we might use one of my dumbbells for the next model don't let it scare you I am strong but I'm also very sensitive okay so we want to mix dumbbell purple and step one is matching the hue this is pretty purple with maybe a little bit of red in it so start off with purple maybe you put a little bit of reddish purple in there mix that together saturation it's kind of hard for me to tell I know that as I mix white stuff's gonna get real d saturated so I don't think I'm going to mix any of the complement into this color yet I'm gonna move on to stage 3 which is the value we're gonna lighten this you see just mixing white has d saturated the color quite a lot do a little color check and whoo that's pretty dang close I think we might need to push a little bit more red than that so I'll put a little bit more reddish purple in I think we're there another check yeah that looks closer alright so we've mixed dumbbell purple so our final subject is going to be this lovely bluish greenish pumpkin and looking at this color wheel here I can already see some bluish greenish tones that look pretty damn close to that and that's one of the benefits of pre-mixing before you go is it takes a lot of the work out of finding the color now you could certainly just take red blue and yellow and get to the right color but pre mixing an advanced a little bit can can make your job a little bit easier so looking here I can already tell that a bluish greenish hue is what we're going to need and I already have one that's d saturated I even have one that's lightened but I have to mix something for this that way you can to give myself a little bit of work on this one so I've lightened and remember every time I lighten with Y I'm gonna lose some of the color so if I try to match this lightness perfectly it's gonna look gray by the time I get there I'll add a little bit more but that goes into one of the things you can do to keep from getting to chalky is I can intentionally paint this pumpkin darker than it actually is if I shift all the values on my subject to a lower value then I can keep some of the color that I'm really going to need so people can look at that and say wow what a vivid blue green pumpkin so let's compare this and look at that that is pretty dang close to some of the darks in this pumpkin and this would probably be the color I want to use for the lights of this pumpkin that way looked colorful by the time I'm done painting so for these darks I would shift them down a little bit as I was matching those colors so there you have it that is the process of doing color matching with your mixed palette step one match the rainbow the hues step to match the saturation and step three match the value put those together cycle through them as often as you need until you get the color that you want thank you so much for learning alongside me today the more you practice mixing and matching these colors the sharper your eye is going to get at detecting these small differences I encourage you to premix your colors before you start a painting a color wheel like this is an incredible starting point for painting I would love to see your mixed palette please take a picture of it and tag me on Instagram have Kyle Keith dark everyone in our little group is learning together to see with a sharper eye thanks again bye bye for now and happy painting [Music]

Channel: Kyle Heath

Views: 1,305,263

Keywords: color mixing, art lessons, painting lessons, oil painting

Id: eBuR2nMGBhQ

Length: 61min 43sec (3703 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 28 2021