made from natural sources
Painted with acrylic paints can be a joy. There are many companies making paintings with each doing a multitude of colors available for the tube, an artist almost never need to mix paints. But where’s the fun?
There is no mystery to blend colors or make a color wheel. It starts with three basic colors, three times and then the sky is the limit. First some definitions.
• Color Wheel – usually a circle around which are the colors of the rainbow
• Primary colors – red, blue and yellow – these are the basic colors. You can not mix other colors to achieve these three colors, however, you mix these three colors for all colors. One caveat: you can get earth tones that are made from natural sources, such as clays and plants. An example is tan.
• Secondary colors – green, orange and purple [or Viola, use these terms interchangeably] – these are interesting because each color is a mixture of two primary colors. Green is a mixture of blue and yellow. Orange is a mixture of yellow and red. Viola is a mixture of blue and red.
• Tertiary Colours – these are the colors of a mid-way between the color of primary and secondary colors. An example would be blue-green – a mixture of blue and green, which is located midway between the two on the color wheel. Another is red-violet, and another is yellow-orange.
All other colors fall somewhere between the primary colors, secondary and tertiary. A word about Black: whites and blacks, like the primary colors are made … can not be mixed with other colors. A warning to black is that you can get some very dark, almost black “black”, a mixture of deep, rich colors together, like Prussian Blue with Purple dioxazine.
Grey is an interesting color. You can mix a combination of dark gray and white. You can combine the attractiveness or neutral gray by mixing a primary color with its complement [secondary color is opposite on the color wheel]. An example of a complementary product mix would be neutral red with green or blue to orange, yellow or purple. You can also make an interesting “black” by combining the three primary colors together, then a gray down by adding a little white.
Make your color wheel. In fact you can do several different color wheels – which depend on red, blue and yellow you choose to start.
An example: start with cobalt blue, Permanent Rose and Cadmium yellow medium. Put these three angles of a triangle [pyramid] with yellow top, blue in the lower right corner and the red dot in the lower left corner. Draw a circle around the triangle. This form is your color wheel.
Put in the secondary colors. Start with the green. Mixing cadmium yellow medium cobalt blue in a relationship of equality. Enter this exactly halfway between yellow and blue on the color wheel. You will notice that is now before the red … Green is the complement of red.
Now make the secondary color of purple. Mix of cobalt blue to pink permanent relationship of equality. Put this violates exactly halfway between red and blue. You will find that is now before the yellow. Yellow and purple are complementary.
