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Saturday, May 14, 2011

Mixing Watercolor Palettes

I love color and mixing watercolor paints to see the different combinations one can make.

The above two palettes, I experimented with several years ago in a class with Jude Siegel at Multnomah Arts Center.
My friend, Sandy, shared some of her favorite palettes and ways to mix them. We started with the primaries- the cool and warm colors

Then added earth tones to our palettes-

Here the fun began to mix the secondary colors-


My blacks are not very black but my rinsing water sure was. Blacks mix the primaries together. The top is the warm primary mix and the bottom the cool primary mix. I need to play with this more and finish my homework- mixing browns with complementary colors. It's fun to use different paint primary colors of blue, red and yellow to get very different mixtures. Going back to some basics helps to remind me to play more with color in my artwork.

7 comments:

  1. Thanks for encouraging us to play with color mixing more often. Your mixes remind me how exciting the colors are when they're wet enough that they mix themselves right on the paper instead of overmixing before applying the color in the position where you want itl
    Your blacks are particularly beautiful. I read somewhere just today that in nature you don't actually see black, rather the darkest dark is really a very dark color.

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  2. I have been checking out watercolours at various art stores....for class at Journalfest.
    Which line do you use? I'm excited to play with colour mixing.

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  3. Celeste, I use tube M. Graham watercolors. I like them because they contain a small amount of honey and do not dry out as much as other brands. You can usually find them on sale at various art stores.

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  4. These look beautiful all together like this. And it's interesting to see the difference in using the warm or cool primaries.

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  5. The mixing of different colors make art work in them selves. I love the idea of honey in water colors-makes you want to eat them!!

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  6. Oh these are really fabulous.. I love doing color palettes. Everyone of these is a beauty.

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  7. I love all of the sample palettes - that is art to me!

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