Complementary mixing pairs: raw sienna and ultramarine blue

This is the first in a series of posts, each of which will dis­cuss one use­ful pair of com­ple­men­tary col­ors. If you’re not famil­iar with art terms, “com­ple­men­tary” in this case doesn’t refer to say­ing nice things about each other, but col­ors on oppo­site sides of the color wheel. Com­ple­men­tary pairs of col­ors are use­ful because they typ­i­cally mix to cre­ate neu­tral and near neu­tral col­ors. Since most of nature is com­posed of neu­trals, any painter who is inter­ested in sub­tlety instead of LOOK AT MY BRIGHT BRIGHT COLORS! needs to learn about work­ing with neu­trals. (Not that there isn’t a place for high-chroma col­ors, but I think they are best used with restraint.)

My favorite com­ple­men­tary mix­ing pair is raw sienna and ultra­ma­rine blue. With them, you can mix a lovely range of cool blues, warm browns, and neu­tral grays. These col­ors don’t call undue atten­tion to them­selves, but they har­mo­nize well with each other and with a wide range of other pig­ments. It’s a valu­able exer­cise to do a whole paint­ing with just these two col­ors and white; you’ll be amazed at how much you can do with them. I’ve done lots of paint­ings in which those two col­ors pre­dom­i­nate, stay­ing in the back­ground and set­ting the stage to allow other, brighter col­ors to stand out beau­ti­fully. Since both of them vary a bit from man­u­fac­turer to man­u­fac­turer, it’s worth com­par­ing a few of each with each other. At the moment, in oil, I use Williams­burg Ital­ian raw sienna and Stu­dio Prod­ucts ultra­ma­rine. They mix very well together.

Update

Williams­burg also sells their Ital­ian raw sienna as a pig­ment; it’s the nicest raw sienna I’ve seen.