Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Color Mixing Swatches


     I danced this morning, had my usual coffee date with a friend, and helped my daughter move into her new apartment, so I didn't have much time to do more than set up a new workable palette.  But.... as I was doing that, I decided to experiment with my colors, my "greens", especially.  
      I use only two yellows... Cadmium Yellow Lemon Pale, and Cadmium Yellow Medium.    They are actually quite different, with the later one taking on a more 'orangeish' hue.  The two blues on my palette are Ultramarine Blue, and Thalo Blue.... also quite different.  The Ultramarine leans more toward purple, and the thalo is more toward the greens.  I was actually quite amazed when I set out to mix the different combinations and record my findings...   To me, the two mixtures with the thalo are brighter, and more intense, while the two mixtures with ultramarine are both more soft and muted.   Of course, the proportions are estimated, so you can achieve lighter or darker values of these colors easily with more blue added to the mixtures, but I think the results are worth a 'look see'.....
YLP= Yellow Lemon Pale
CYL= Cadmium Yellow Light
Aliz. C= Alizarin Crimson
CRM= Cadmium Red Medium

     I found the oranges quite similar, with the same experiment of color mixing...  Maybe a little more intense with the combinations that contained the Cadmium Red Medium, as opposed to the Alizarin Crimson.   

2 comments:

  1. I'm still enjoying your blog posts and beautiful sunflowers. In a color theory class several years ago, I mixed swatches of the warm and cool primary colors and put them on a canvas board that I can refer to when I need to compare colors. That was a very helpful exercise and I look at my samples often.

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  2. Peg, I use Carol Marine's palette colors... there are 2 yellows, 2 reds, and 2 blues, plus burnt umber and white. It's possible to do soooo much with just those.

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