Watercolor Painting for Dummies (27 page)

As you begin to mix colors, sooner or later you encounter (cue sinister music)
the ominous
mud.
Mud
is the result when the colors mix up just plain ugly. You can get mud when mixing a neutral color from complements (see the “Getting along with complementary colors” section earlier in the chapter). Or mud can appear when paint is
opaque,
meaning you can’t see through it.
Transparent
paint allows the viewer to see through the paint. Light bounces through the paint to the white paper and back into your eye so you see glowing colors. You can’t see through opaque paint, so the light can’t bounce off the paper and no light is reflected. The result can look chalky and dull — like mud.

Mixing complementary colors neutralizes colors, which looks like a gray-brown color. Sometimes this is a useful, beautiful color. Mud or neutral? It depends on your intention — but it’s important to know how to get what you want or avoid what you don’t want.

So why do you sometimes mix colors and get a color that isn’t what you hoped it would be? Here is the secret:

Paint pigments are not pure colors. They may have a little bit of another color in them. So when you mix red and blue and hope to get purple, it sometimes comes out brown. Mud. How did that happen? You need to have the correct red and blue. For example, if I mix cadmium red and Prussian blue together, I should get purple, right? Yes, according to what the color wheel says. Instead, I get a muddy brown. Why? Those two colors have a tiny bit of yellow in them. So essentially, I mixed yellow, red, and blue, a formula for neutral gray. Without knowing it, I mixed the wrong blue and red. So it is important to understand which primary colors to mix to achieve secondary colors.

Each color contains a primary color adjacent to it on the color wheel, and that adjacent color is called the
bias.
The red and blue in my example each had a yellow bias.

So each primary color has two biases:

Figure 5-3 shows a bias color wheel.

Figure 5-3:
Bias color wheel.

So, you need to have two of each primary color on your painting palette so you can mix colors that have the right bias. Sometimes you have to visually evaluate the color to determine the bias. Compare it and see which color it leans toward to determine bias.

When you mix two primary colors to get a secondary color, use the primaries biased toward each other; for example, use a blue that is biased red (ultramarine blue) and a red that is biased blue (alizarin crimson) to make a nice purple. That way you have only two primary colors involved. Three primary colors mix mud. Say the primary and its bias out loud when mixing. If you mention three primaries, you have mud.

Hue:
Basically another word for color.

Value:
Describes how light or dark the color is.

Temperature:
Relates to the feeling of warmth or coolness the color evokes and to whether the color recedes as cool colors do or comes forward as warm colors do.

Intensity:
Measures the range of a color from dull to vivid. Synonyms are
chroma
and
saturation.

Hue
is simply the name that describes the color: red, blue, yellow. The words “color” and “hue” are similar in meaning. Hue also refers to a family of color based on the primary and secondary colors. The tint pink is a hue of red. We may have cute names for pigments, like daffodil, but it’s a yellow hue.

Value
is the lightness or darkness of a color. Each color has a
range of value.
Think of white as step 1 and black as step 9. Each of the seven steps of gray in between is one shade darker than the one before it.

It’s easy to see value in black, white, and gray, but colors also have steps of value. However, most of them don’t have all nine steps. The number of steps is the range of value. Some colors, like yellow, have a narrow range of value. Full-strength yellow may be only the same value as step 3 in gray. Blue, on the other hand, has a deeper range of value. A dark blue can be a step 8 or 9 in the value range. Figure 5-4 shows the value ranges of some common colors.

Squint your eyes when looking at a color to reduce the hue into a value. As you squint, you see the lights and darks and eliminate the color. You can also reduce color to just value by looking through a piece of red transparency film. Everything will be red, sure, but you can see the values.

To change a color’s value, add water to lighten the color, and use less water to darken it. A transparent watercolorist only uses water to change value. A nontransparent watercolorist may use white pigment to tint the color.

Figure 5-4:
Color value ranges.

Seeing the lighter side of colors

To make any color lighter, add water to the pigment.

Explore the value range of each of your colors, and see how many steps of value you can find for each.

1.
Choose a color and squirt paint from the tube into your palette.

If the paint is too stiff to brush out, bring a dab out onto the mixing area of the palette and add enough water to make it slightly soft. You don’t want to dilute the color yet, so add very little water.

2.
Paint the pure pigment on the paper in a 1-inch square.

A 1/2-inch flat brush makes rectangles easily because of its shape. This pure pigment is 100 percent as dark as the color will go.

3.
On your palette, add a little water to the paint in the mixing area. If you get too much water by accident, add a little more pigment.

4.
Using that value, paint a second 1-inch square that is one step lighter than the first pure-pigment square.

5.
Add a little more water to the paint on the palette, and paint another square that is a step lighter than the previous one.

6.
Repeat Step 5 until you can’t make the color any lighter.

Try to make each consecutive step lighter than the last, as shown in Figure 5-4. This figure shows you how many steps of value you can get from a color. Make a value range for each of your paint pigments.

Turning to the dark side

Getting a rich, dark value with watercolors can be tricky. The paint is diluted with water and it evaporates as the paint dries. The color can dry 30 percent lighter than you thought it was when you applied it wet.

You may think that piling on more of the color is the way to make it darker. Instead, the color becomes opaque and chalky — the opposite of the transparent look you’re aiming for — and it still isn’t dark. The color only becomes as dark as the value range will allow. In other words, lighter colors like yellow will only be so dark; they’ll never be as dark as colors like blue or green.

You can make values darker two ways:

You can control the value by using less water to dilute.

You can combine colors to produce dark values.

Black seems like an appropriate color to use to darken another color. But sometimes black just makes the color lifeless. Instead, add a color with a deeper range of value to darken a lighter color. If you’re painting an apple, alizarin crimson is a good hue to begin using. For the shadow area, add a darker color like ultramarine blue.

Make a chart to mix dark colors. Make triangles with the two paired colors from the following list at the top two corners, and bring the mixture down to the bottom point of the triangle. Label the colors. Can you find other combinations that make a rich dark?

Hookers green and alizarin crimson

Ultramarine blue and burnt sienna

Burnt umber and phthalocyanine blue

Cadmium red and Prussian blue

Burnt umber and phthalocyanine green