Practical Color Mixing 2: Hue

In the pre­vi­ous post

Iden­ti­fy­ing hue

Nudg­ing

Using a mix­ing color wheel

Steven Quiller sells a use­ful color mix­ing wheel. Bruce MacEvoy at Hand­print has a some­what dif­fer­ent one that you can print out for free (it’s designed for water­color, but I have found it to be rea­son­ably use­ful for other media as well).

With oil paint, it’s best to mix with a palette knife rather than a brush. Once you’re used to it, the knife is faster because you can clean it so quickly, and your paint piles don’t become con­t­a­m­i­nated with other pigments.

Coör­di­nat­ing hue and chroma

Notice that if you draw a straight line between any two col­ors on the out­side the wheel, every point on the line rep­re­sents a lower chroma than those two col­ors. So mix­ing tends to reduce chroma. As a gen­eral rule, any mix­ture is duller than the brighter of the two paints being mixed, and often duller than either one. There are a very few excep­tions (some warm pig­ments become a lit­tle more chro­matic when mixed with each other and some cool pig­ments become more chro­matic when mixed with a small amount of white), but chroma reduc­tion is the usual effect of paint mixing.

OK,

Coör­di­nat­ing hue and value

Warmth and coolth

Mun­sell hue ter­mi­nol­ogy here.) In between col­ors include green, green yel­low, pur­ple, and red pur­ple (some peo­ple would label green and pur­ple as warm and green yel­low and red pur­ple as cool). There are some aspects of the warm/cool divi­sion that are use­ful to include in a dis­cus­sion of color mixing.