All the Strange Hours » art technique

Repost: Glazing

David — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 11:28:23 +0000

First published on 1 October 2006.

Among oil painters, there seems to be a common misconception that glazing is some kind of mystical technique that only a few can master. The basic process is, however, very simple. Glazing is putting one layer of paint over another so that you can see the underlayer through the upper layer of paint. Glazing is a form of indirect painting, which just means that you are painting with more than one layer, allowing previous layers to dry before you add more paint on top.

Glazing can be used for a number of purposes. As I noted my post comparing the glazing methods of Italian and Netherlandish Renaissance painters, glazing can be used to create optical color mixtures (a blue glazed over a yellow makes a green) or to create modeling effects (thicker layers of transparent paint are darker, so you can adjust value by adjusting the thickness of the paint). Some artists glaze over a whole painting to unify the overall tone. Others will glaze specific parts of the painting. One method is to do an initial monotone underpainting (in shades of grey, for example) then apply color over it. This simplifies the process of painting by first tackling pure value, then working out hue and chroma. Some modern portrait painters will do an initial painting of flesh in shades of green (they incorrectly call this a “verdaccio”). They then glaze with reds and oranges (complementaries and near-complementaries to green), providing the flesh tones with a sense of vitality that is difficult to achieve with direct painting. Glazing can also be useful for maintaining chroma in light colors. Mixing with a lot of white will seriously reduce the chroma of most colors, resulting in a look often described as “chalky.” If you glaze the same color over white, however, you can achieve an optical effect that is high in value, with more chroma that you could get by mixing that color with white.

Because a glaze darkens what it covers (unless its a scumble—see below), it is best to do the underpainting lighter than the intended final effect. If you are going to glaze, it’s important for the underpainting to have as smooth a surface as possible. That’s because irregularities will trap excess amounts of paint in the glaze layer, creating weird little spots of darker paint. So, before the paint dries, it’s a good idea to go over it very lightly with a soft dry brush, looking for lumps and gently brushing them down. After the underpainting has dried thoroughly, you may want to wet sand to create as smooth a surface as possible.

In selecting paint colors to glaze with, it is useful to distinguish among opaque colors (like cadmium yellow), semi-transparent colors (like ultramarine blue), and transparent colors (like alizarin crimson). While any of these colors can be used for glazing, transparent and semi-transparent colors are darker when they are put on more thickly. Opaque colors can be used for glazing, but only when they are applied in a thin layer. A thick layer of an opaque color is not a glaze, because you can’t see the underpainting through it.

Many oil painters think that the best way to glaze is to dilute the paint with medium to a watery or syrupy consistency (this is what a lot of art instruction manuals tell you to do). The paint becomes less opaque because the pigment particles are separated by a larger than normal amount of transparent vehicle. This type of glaze is called a dilution glaze. In my (deeply humble) opinion, it’s the wrong way to glaze. It’s bad technique for (at least) three reasons: (1) all of that extra resin and oil will darken and yellow over time, ruining the effect; (2) dilution glazes tend to create a sort of “tinted photograph” effect that doesn’t have the solidity a painter is usually trying to depict; and (3) the documentation I’ve found on historical glazing techniques suggests that only small amounts of resin are detected in glazing layers in Renaissance Netherlandish paintings, which I consider to be the gold standard in glazing for both beauty and longevity.

A better method is called a reduction glaze. This approach involves adjusting the transparency of the paint by adjusting the thickness of the paint layer. While you can do a reduction glaze with nothing but pure oil paint, it helps to first lubricate the surface by applying a very thin layer of a slippery medium. My preferred glazing medium is a 50/50 mixture of black oil (linseed cooked with lead) and Venice turpentine (if you don’t like to use substances containing lead, linseed oil will work almost as well). Studio Products also sells an excellent glazing medium. You can also use plain linseed or walnut oil as a glazing medium. Put a drop of medium on the surface, rubbing it in with your fingers to spread it as far as possible. This way, you can cover a large area with just a few drops of medium. In addition to putting some on the surface, you can also put just a tiny bit of medium in your paint, but I don’t usually find that necessary.

Mix up the color you want to glaze with. Apply it thickly and evenly to the desired area with a brush. It will look like a horrible mess at this stage, but have faith. You will now reduce the thickness of the glaze to the desired opacity and value. Do this by dabbing with a soft brush, smearing with your fingers, rubbing with a cloth or sponge, or whatever works to adjust the glaze to achieve the desired effect. With a little practice, a reduction glaze is really pretty easy. You can get nice gradations in color and value by creating a gradation from thin to thick. Or you can create gradations from one color to another. Once you have the glaze spread to the right thickness, you can, if you like, paint into it with other colors. For example, you can apply light highlights into a wet glaze and then blend it in. If desired, you can let your glaze dry and then add one or more additional layers of glazing. For example, you can get really intense, chromatic darks by glazing with multiple layers of transparent paint.

When mixing colors for a glaze, it is sometimes helpful to add a small amount of white to your mixtures. This provides a greater sense of solidity.

If you glaze with very light colors containing a lot of white, it is usually called a scumble. Titanium white, being very opaque, can be a bad choice for scumbling. Flake white and zinc white are much easier to create transparency effects with. A very white, hazy glaze is called a velatura (“veil”). A velatura can be a great way to depict transparent smoke, haze, or fog.

Update

Instead of making sure the underpainting surface is smooth before glazing over it, you can deliberately give it lots of texture. Then the glaze will sink into the nooks and crannies, creating a sense of dimensional relief. Rembrandt often used this technique.

Repost: So you’ve decided to try oil painting

David — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 18:28:20 +0000

Since this month is the site’s two year anniversary, I am re-posting some items from the past that I particularly like. This one was first posted on 28 August 2006.

If you are just starting out with oil paint, I have some advice.

First, be realistic. Don’t think you’re going to make any masterpieces any time soon, and never think that there are any shortcuts. If you just want to play around and don’t care about developing real skill, then just do that and have a good time. But if you are serious about learning to paint well, realize this: while it’s not that difficult to learn how to make mediocre paintings that your mom will like (or tell you she likes), making good paintings is hard—really hard. It takes a lot of practice, regardless of talent, to learn how to paint well. You will make many bad paintings before you make your first good one. If you are someone who can’t stand to be bad at something, over and over, before you get good, then oil painting isn’t for you. Maybe you should try video games. You can find cheat codes for many of them that will make you invincible.

Second, keep it simple. It’s counter-productive to plan complicated projects until you have the skill to pull them off. Your subjects, to start off, should be simple. An egg, a mug, a tree. No people. No copying photos. Your goal, to start out, should be to do some bad paintings that no one will want to look at. If your goal is to make bad paintings, it won’t be too hard to get there. After ten of those, you can start to think about paintings that are…less bad. You’ll learn more, in the same amount of time, by making several simple bad paintings than by making one complicated bad painting.

Third, there is no reason to start out by spending a lot of money or getting fancy with materials. Get a few tubes of decent, artist-grade paint. Don’t get student grade, don’t buy a beginner’s painting set, and don’t buy water miscibles or other convenience oil paints. A good starter palette would be titanium white, ultramarine blue, burnt sienna, raw sienna, and ivory black (you can get these from Robert Doak for well under $40—but don’t let him sell you anything else). Those pigments are all inexpensive and non-toxic (not that you should eat them). You won’t be able to make bright, high chroma paintings with this simple palette, but that’s a good thing: until you learn to mix neutral colors, a high chroma pallete would only force you to make luridly nasty paintings. Get some small primed canvases (no more than 8 × 10”) or some of those primed canvas pads. Get some brushes—I’d suggest a couple of bristle flats about as wide as your thumb and some synthetic sable (soft) flats about as wide as your pinkie (if you have particularly wide or narrow fingers, adjust accordingly). Also get a pack of cheap plastic palette knives. Get a pad of disposable paper palettes and a big roll of paper towels. For cleaning brushes, either go to the hardware store and buy some odorless mineral spirits, or go to the art store and get some linseed oil. Get a basic easel—a cheap table easel will do. If you continue to paint, you’ll be upgrading all of this stuff. If you find that you hate painting, find a niece or nephew to give the stuff to.

Fourth, learn to handle the paint. Set up your easel and a blank canvas. Squirt a little of each paint onto the edges of your palette. Make an abstract painting that doesn’t look like anything. Play around. Until you get used to oil paint, you may find that it’s sticky and hard to manage. Don’t thin your paint down to make it manageable; never add more than a tiny bit of oil or solvent to the paint. Learn how to load paint onto the brush; not too much, not too little. Learn how to make a flat area of one color that isn’t streaky (hint: don’t be afraid to scrub the paint into the canvas with a bristle brush). Learn to make definite strokes; never dab it on. Mix two colors together with a palette knife—try ultramarine and raw sienna. That makes a gray. Add some white. That makes a light gray. Try mixing every combination of paints on your palette to see what colors they make. Learn how to make darks without using black (I’ve done many paintings in which the darkest darks were a mixture of ultramarine and burnt sienna). Black is a good mixing color, but it’s of limited utility for making other colors darker. When you make a mistake, learn how to scrape the paint off with a palette knife, wipe off the remainder with a rag soaked in a little bit of solvent, and start that section over. Learn to blend two colors, laying down two adjacent tones of paint, then using a soft dry brush (cleaned every few strokes) to feather between them, gradually developing a gradation. Use multiple brushes at a time—one for each color, or at least one for darks and another for lights. Learn how to apply light paint over dark paint (or dark over light, which is harder) without having them mix more than you want to and getting all muddy. This last skill takes a very light touch and plenty of practice.

Fifth, pick a simple subject and try to paint it. You may want to start with just a painting in one color, using just shades of black and white, or burnt sienna and white. Try a painting with just ultramarine, raw sienna, and white. You won’t be able to mix every color you see, but, in fact, you can’t do that no matter how many colors you use. Don’t drive yourself nuts with arbitrary limits, but try to make your first few paintings quickly, in an hour or two each. It doesn’t matter if they are any good, and if you are trying hard to make good paintings you’ll be too frustrated to continue. Your goal is to make some bad paintings that no one but you will ever see, learning from each one. Finish a painting, put it away without thinking about quality, and move on to the next one.

Sixth, after you’ve done ten or so small bad paintings, take a look at them. Are the last ones as bad as the first ones? What have you learned to do well? What is still embarassingly bad? What do you need to learn next? Understand that your own perception of your work will tend toward either absolute enchantment or utter loathing (often with rapid swings from one to the other). Learn to appraise your own work realistically. Try looking at it in a mirror—that sometimes helps. Find someone you trust to give you honest but not excessively critical feedback (but decide for yourself whether they are right or wrong).

Seventh, save up some more money and get some more supplies. You probably want some more colors. Add them to your palette one or two at a time after experimenting with how they mix with the other colors you already use. Try some zinc white, which is much less overpowering in mixtures than titanium. Try cadmium red or cadmium yellow. Learn about pigments and choose paints that are made with only one pigment (you don’t need paint companies to do your mixing for you). Get some more brushes. Think about a better easel. Think about better surfaces than acrylic primer. Think about making some panels. Think about more complicated subjects (but not too complicated). Look at good paintings by artists you admire and think about how they might be made. Are there any painting classes you could enroll in? Read the rest of this web log, other web sites, and books to learn more about what you can do with paint.

Good luck.

More art advice

David — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 01:27:51 +0000

Paulin writes,

Here my dilemma today. I need to fill a 36 × 36 Canvas with a base color. I need the paint to be really fluid/wet so as to have a very smooth surface (no brush strokes) and be able to blend monochromatically to give some depth. I am getting all kinds of mixed messages about how to handle the paint itself. Some say use galkyd slow dry with a bit of turpenoid, but I have read that the paint can “wrinkle”. Some say use liquin but it will take forever to dry…

I’m personally not a big fan of alkyd-based mediums, especially in multi-layered paintings. Also, I hate the way they smell.

Here’s what I’d do. I would thin the paint very slightly (I like real turps or spike, but not everyone likes the smell, so you can use mineral spirits if necessary). Make sure you have excellent ventilation. I’d apply the paint with a wide, soft brush, getting it reasonably flat. Then I’d take a clean soft flat or fan brush and dip it in solvent. With a very soft touch, I’d whisper it over the surface of the painting, knocking down flat spots. This would take a long time for a 36 × 36 canvas. I’d let the canvas dry flat in a dust-free room (or covered by a jury-rigged plastic “tent” to keep dust off of it).

Another option would be to add a bit of thinned stand oil to the paint. Stand oil tends to level brush strokes and dry hard and glossy, especially when the painting is allowed to dry flat to avoid sagging. For layers after that, you’d need to take steps to ensure adhesion to the glossy base layer, such as wet sanding or using a medium containing a balsam.

Another tempera grassa recipe

David — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 01:05:55 +0000

Those who’ve been reading here for awhile or have delved into the archives know that I’ve sometimes experimented with a traditional painting medium called tempera grassa. TG was most commonly used in the 15th and 16th centuries; it represents a transitional medium between egg tempera and true oil painting. TG consists of pigment mixed with an emulsion of egg and oil. Since the 16th century, TG has been fairly obscure—the best recent example would be the 20th century Italian master, Pietro Annigoni.

In the 19th century (especially in Germany), painting recipes were developed that involved various combinations of tempera ingredients, often including some combination of egg white, whole egg, linseed oil, stand oil, dammar varnish, stand oil, and turpentine. You can find many such recipes on the internet with a few simple Google searches. I’ve usually avoided these relatively complex recipes in favor of simple emulsions of egg yolk (the traditional binder for egg tempera) and linseed or walnut oil, mixed with pigment/water paste.

Recently, I ran across a web reprint of Egg Tempera Painting, Tempera Underpainting, Oil Emulsion Painting: A Manual of Technique, by Vaclav Vitlacyl and Rupert Davidson Turnbull. Published in 1935, it is a compendium of various tempera techniques. One that caught my eye is a recipe they call “putrido.” Putrido is one name for tempera grassa (because it starts to smell bad after a few days). They say that this is based on a recipe from an old manuscript found in Venice. For all I know it’s what was used in the Renaissance.

Take whatever quantity of dry color you wish to prepare. Divide it into two equal parts. Rub up one part with yolk of egg only into a fairly stiff paste. Rub up the other part with sun-bleached linseed oil, to about the consistency of ordinary tube colours. (To save time or trouble, it is possible to use ordinary tube oil colours, but to be sure of your ingredients, it is always advisable to grind your own colour in oil.) The part that is rubbed up with oil may be slightly larger in quantity than the part rubbed with yolk of egg. Then take the two parts so prepared and grind them together, preferably on the marble slab. It will be found that when these two parts are put together, the resultant mixture will stiffen at once into a very stiff paste, too stiff to be easily rubbed. This may be softened down by the addition of either water, emulsion, or linseed oil. If you wish to use the Putrido in its leaner form, add either water or the emulsion (Medium Fat Emulsion), but if you wish to paint with it as an oil paint using oil as the medium, then thin it down with oil. In either case, add the water, the emulsion, or the oil very slowly, only a few drops at a time, until the paste becomes a smooth cream easily handled on the marble slab.

I find this to be pretty interesting. It is a recipe that is similar to what I’ve done before, is simple to make, doesn’t involve solvents, and uses egg yolk (rather than the white or the whole egg), with which I am more familiar. They suggest that adding a small amount of oil of clove will preserve the paint mixture and allow it to be kept for some time (although not indefinitely). I expect that storing them in a refrigerator, especially in warm weather, would be a good idea. The oil of clove would also act as a retarder for the oil component of the paint, causing to dry more slowly. That could be a good or a bad thing, but I expect one would have to wait between layers for the paint to dry. You could try to balance the retarding effect of the clove oil by adding a small amount of lead napthenate, but that makes for a more complex reaction than I am really comfortable with.

I’ll have to try this recipe soon. I have a large painting that I started in tempera and then stopped work on. It might make an excellent underpainting for this TG recipe.

Light brush, dark brush

David — Mon, 19 May 2008 02:55:08 +0000

Typically, when I’m painting, I’m working on one particular passage or section. The colors in that passage are often one hue (or a small range of hues) and one chroma (or small range of chromas). So in any given passage, what tends most to vary from one spot to another is the value.

Usually, what I do when painting in oil is work with two brushes—one for the lighter sections of that passage and one for the darker parts. The value may have a wide range or a narrow range, but either way it’s helpful to have one brush for each purpose. That’s useful, I think, for two reasons. One is the simple technical point that it’s easy to keep track of two brushes, loading, applying, wiping, mixing, and re-loading. It’s a lot quicker to change the paint on a brush from a dark to a mid tone than it is to change from a dark to a light.

The other way that working with a dark brush and a light brush is in terms of thinking about light. As I’m working on a passage I can think about how the light is affecting it at a particular point. If the primary thing happening is that the section I’m working on is turning toward the light, then I automatically grab the light brush. If it’s turning away, then I grab the dark brush. I find it useful to think in that binary way because that’s how light works: a given point is either toward the light or away from it compared to nearby parts of that passage. By working with two brushes, I always keep that in mind.

Finger painting

David — Thu, 08 May 2008 02:16:30 +0000

I was working on a still life this evening and realized, once again, what wonderful painting tools I have attached to my hands. Oil paint seems made for finger painting. Fingers are great for smoothing paint, blending, creating certain kinds of textural effects, and shaping blobs of paint. Even very early oil painters used their fingers often (we know because art historians find lots of fingerprints in Renaissance paintings).

I tend to use my fingers mostly in the early stages of painting, when I’m working large and am not too worried about detail. Fingers are great for making sure that you don’t commit to hard edges too early. While working, I am continually smooshing with my fingers and wiping them clean on my t-shirt or a rag. Fingers are easier to clean than brushes, so there is less tendency to inadvertently contaminate one passage with a color from some other part of the painting.

Of course, it’s important not to get paint in your eyes or mouth. I am very careful not to touch my face or hair while painting. When I’m done, I wash my hands very thoroughly. That’s particularly important if you use potentially toxic pigments, but good practice no matter what.

Some benefits of keeping a “Studio Journal”

Katarzyna — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 17:37:05 +0000

First and foremost - to keep the work alive with thinking/reflection
To preserve unique moments of a discovery
To preserve equally unique moments of a struggle/crisis
To learn from one’s own story
To exercise an insight and self-recognition
To learn self-discipline and persistence
To develop skill in a creative/accurate writing

By “Studio Journal” I mean any form of a written record of one’s own progress/actions in an artistic studio (by ‘studio’ I mean an actual workplace - wherever thinking/working takes place; it can be a gallery, trip, workshop, library).

It can be kept in a form of a sketchbook, where drawings, work-samples, illustrations are included, however a special care should be taken for putting experiences into words… It’s slightly similar to maintaining a web-blog, however, more personal…

It’s best rewarding when the discipline of regular notes (based on everyday, each two/three days frequency) is applied consistently.

I’ve been sustaining my own ‘Journal’ for a month as for now and must say - it’s got a power to surprise. I mean - reading my own two-weeks-old thoughts is sometimes like flying on another planet…

But one important rule - one has to be honest - and a diary is a great lecture on honesty… On one day I wrote: “I’m not going to pretend that I have something interesting to say…” And sometimes is nothing more than that…

So, good luck with that - if you accept this challenge of mine…

Flat space

David — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 20:05:06 +0000

Some 20th-century realists, such as David Hockney, tend to paint a blank wall as, well, blank. By that I mean that they mix up some color and paint that wall a flat tone. No texture, no color variation, just one plain color. If the blank wall has, say, a cast shadow falling on it, they will paint that, but the shadow will also be just one undifferentiated color, just like the light portion of the wall. Skies, tabletops, streets—even skin tones—tend to get the same treatment.

That doesn’t work for me. First of all, it’s not “realistic,” in that human vision (at least as I experience it as a human with functioning vision) never has areas of flat color. If I look at a plain wall, it has constant variations in hue, chroma, and value. I just don’t see any flat color there.

That doesn’t mean the artist can’t paint it flat if that’s the way it looks to him or her, or if that evokes a certain feeling the artist wants to reference. But the big problem with flatness is that it distances me emotionally from the painting. Flat color pushes me away. It says, “there isn’t anything to see here—this space intentionally left blank.” A flat area of color emphasizes the reality that the painting itself is flat. The painting becomes less realist and more abstract, in a way that I find unappealing. Flat paintings are more “modern” (in the sense of being more 20th century), but that’s not a selling point as far as I am concerned. I like simplicity in paintings, but not that kind of simplicity.

By contrast, texture pulls me into the painting. It can be used to create a sense of mystery, as in the subtle darks of a Rembrandt painting. It communicates more about the visual reality that the painter is attempting to lure me into observing.Â It gives me a reason to spend more time looking, and from the standpoint of a painter, that is never a bad thing.

As a result, I spend lots of time with the “blank” parts of my paintings. I typically use multiple layers and think about how much texture and color variation to apply. Some blank areas get more attention than detail areas. That doesn’t show so much in a photograph of the painting—but that’s just one more reason why the original is better than any reproduction. And that, from the standpoint of a painter, is an excellent thing.

Stepping back

David — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 01:16:12 +0000

One thing I try to do frequently when painting (and don’t do quite frequently enough) is to step back about ten feet and look at it. It’s a good idea to do that at least every few minutes. By stepping back, you pull yourself away from focusing on the passage you’re working on right now and look at how all the parts relate to the whole. You see mistakes in proportion, symmetry, form, composition, color, and value. You see, literally, the big picture. And you work the kinks out of your back.

If you can’t remember to do this, then force it. Keep your palette 10 feet behind you so you have to step away. Keep the painting next to the thing you are painting, so you have to step back to a station point to see the view that you are painting. Or set a kitchen timer to go off every five minutes. Whatever you need to do to make yourself step away often is a worthwhile exercise.

Color mixing for beginners

David — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 02:43:38 +0000

It seems, from reading the occasional email that people send to me and looking over posts at internet art fora, that quite a number of less experienced painters have trouble learning the basics of color mixing. They often complain about mixing “mud” or feeling like the just don’t have any control over the mixing process.

That’s not too surprising, because color mixing is kind of complex. I have a whole article on the subject, but it’s pretty long and not really something a new painter is going to be able to digest easily. So here I’ll try something a little different. This article is about how to start learning how to mix paint. It’s for people just starting to paint and people who may have learned some other aspects of painting, but find mixing paint to be an exercise in frustration.

Practice. Lots of artists have learned how to mix paint without any clue about color theory, through simple perseverance. Keep painting and over time you’ll get better at mixing.
Simplify. Cut down on the number of paints on your palette. Try two or three. That won’t let you mix any color you want, but that’s a good thing. Until you can control three or four colors, it won’t help to squeeze out 20 colors that you don’t know what to do with. (And by the way, many of the greatest old master paintings were done with six or seven pigments. Total.) Only add colors to your palette after you’ve learned to control those that are already there.
Simplify some more. As a beginner, you will learn more by spending five hours painting five small simple paintings than by spending five hours mucking around with one big complicated painting. Don’t try to make the kinds of paintings you want to be doing a year from now, make small paintings of just one or two things. No portraits.
Throw away reference photos and work only from life. It’s hard enough learning to mix the right value, chroma, and hue without the distortions introduced by photos. Later on, once you really know what you’re doing, you may be able to paint convincingly from photos. I’m still pretty bad at that, myself.
Learn to see color. Any color has three properties: value (lightness or darkness), chroma (intensity), and hue (where the color falls on the color wheel). Always think about colors in terms of those three properties. If you don’t know what color something is, you can’t mix a color that matches it. Value is most important, then chroma, then hue (that’s not an aesthetic opinion, it’s how your brain prioritizes color information). If you’re having trouble mixing the right color, stop chasing the hue. Get the value right, then the chroma. It’s OK for now if the hue is only approximately correct.
Avoid pretty colors. Go for dull earth colors. Pretty, high-chroma colors are harder to control. You want to start with easy colors, then work you way up to the powerful ones. Especially avoid pthalo colors and other modern high-intensity organic pigments.
Before you start a painting, you should know what the color scheme is going to be. It’s a great idea to do a very small, very loose color sketch beforehand. Only paint the big masses and don’t try to make a pretty color study. Don’t blend—just paint flat areas of color. Ted Seth Jacobs calls these “poster studies.” They make the final painting much easier, because once you’ve done the study, you know how to mix 90% of the colors you are going to use in the final painting.
Mix slowly and deliberately. Much of the time spent painting is observation, thinking, and mixing. Application is a small portion of the time you spend painting.
Figure out what color you want and have a plan for how to get it. If you have no idea how to mix a color, then stop working on your painting and figure out how to get an approximation of the desired color. Again, if you can’t get it exactly right, go for the right value.
As soon as the mix goes wrong (turns to “mud,” becomes something you never expected, etc.) then scrape it off your palette. Think again, then start over. Don’t keep chasing the color.
Learn what the paints on your palette do. If you don’t have a good idea what color you will get when you mix two of your paints together, you aren’t ready to make a painting. Practice mixtures until you understand your paints.
Mix with a palette knife, not a brush. Keep your paint piles uncontaminated.
Add small amounts of paint at a time.
Most of the world is lower in chroma than the paints that come out of your paint tubes. Get used to adjusting the chroma downward unless you have a specific need for high chroma in a particular passage. Fortunately, when you mix two paints together, the result is usually lower in chroma.
Don’t be afraid of strong value contrasts. Let your darkest dark be very dark and your lightest light be very light. A strong contrast of values allows strong modeling and convincing depiction of dimensionality.

I could go on and on, but I’m trying to keep this very simple. Perhaps later I’ll post some more suggestions.