Beginner Color Theory for Rebels: How to choose a palette and stop mixing mud

1. Introduction: Hello and welcome to color theory for rebels. In this class, you're going to understand why you can't just take red and blue, mix them together and hope that you get purple. So who's this class for? This class is designed more around traditional artists. There's a lot of other skills you will need if you're a digital artist, especially when you're dealing with color. And so specifically, if you're someone who uses traditional media that is paints or watercolors or colored pencil or crayons or whatever it is. Something where you're applying a pigment to a support and something where those pigments mixed together to make different colors. It's geared specifically towards new artists who were baffled by color theory, who have tried to mix colors and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, you're not sure why. So that's who this class is for, is someone who wants to stop mixing mud and understand every single time how they can nail the color they want. So why this class? Well, I'm sharing my experiences with you because once I bought the wrong paints and this was my second set of artist quality paints that were very expensive. And I came home and I started trying to mix colors and I was just mixing mud no matter what I did, I couldn't get them to mix into the colors I wanted. And I didn't know why I thought I was doing something wrong. But it turns out that it was just the paints that didn't mix to make the colors I wanted. And now that I know that when I go out and I buy new paints or I use the existing paints I have, I know exactly which ones to put into my palette so that I can get the colors I want for the painting that I'm doing right then. So what are we going to learn? The first is the science of color in traditional media. Now you'll hear me talk a lot about painting. And that's because I'm going to be doing some live demos using paint. It's just easier for me to show you how colors mixed when I can literally mix two liquids together and get a third liquid of a different color. But if you use things like colored pencils or pastels or whatever it is, you're still going to learn a lot from this course. And we're going to talk about the science of color in those traditional media. We're going to talk about why the color wheel is holding you back in some rebellious ideas for how to get away from that. We're going to then look at three different sets of primary colors and start talking about things like wood. If I choose a different yellow, what happens to my colors that I can mix them? What happens to all of my colors that I can create from those? We're then going to talk about practical considerations for choosing your specific palette of colors. So when you go out and you want to buy some paints, you don't want to buy every paint the store, you're going to look at the specific palette of colors that you can choose and the practical applications. We're going to talk about creating your own best palette. The class project you're going to make as many color wheels as you have primary combinations. Now I don't want you going out and buying new things you're going to work with what you already have. Then you're going to choose a set of primaries is going to form your go-to palette. And I'll talk about how you're going to do that towards the end of the course. Finally, you're going to make a mixing chart from that palette and sharing with the class so we can see what you can do. So grab some paints or maybe some colored pencils, whatever you want to work with and the support you're going to work with. And let us learn about color theory. 2. Discussing Materials: This course shouldn't require you to go out and bind whole new materials. In fact, it's best if you don't. So if you already have a bunch of paints with you or maybe colored pencils, whatever your medium happens to be. I want you to stick with that. But I am going to talk a little bit about the things I'm going to be using and then you can choose on your own. So I'm going to actually be using a free digital painting software called Krita. And you can get that at www.dot_org. It works on just about every operating system you can imagine. So if you have Windows or Mac or Linux, it will work there. And the reason I'm going to be using digital for a lot of our demonstrations is because it's a lot easier for me to show you what happens when I have all the different colors and I'll be trying to use the faithful colors. I'll go and learn about all the different color coordinates that we are going to be putting into criticise, I'll be using real colors. It's just, I'm going to be doing a digitally so we can mix it in different proportions. And I don't have to keep on mixing paint for, you know, it's just watch me do them. And then I'll do some live demos using acrylics and watercolors. So you can see how this applies to a real-world in actual traditional media and paint. Now what should you be using? Well, I want you to use the materials you want to explore color with. So if you're someone who really loves colored pencils and you've got a 100 colored pencils there, then I want you to use those. On the other hand, if you're just getting into, say, acrylic painting and you've got a set of 12 paints. That's fantastic. So I want you to use whatever it is you have and you've been using and you've been frustrated by or want to learn more about. Now personally, if you have the option of choosing between different media, I recommend using paints or inks in order to explore color. And that's because when you mix liquids together, they mix much more predictably than say, a dry medium like a pastel or a colored pencil, especially if you're a newer artists, they're a little bit harder to blend. So if you do have liquid media like paints or inks, that is what I would strongly recommend. And as I said before, I will be using paints in the live demos. So you can see what happens when you actually start mixing colors and mixing different paints. Now, other things you're going to need well some kind of support. So whatever works for your medium, maybe it's Canvas, maybe it's paper, maybe it's wood or metal, whatever works for you. And then whenever you'd normally use to apply your medium. So maybe you need some brushes, some water, some mixing palettes, that sort of thing. So I'm going to leave that up to you because I expect that everyone watching this course is going to have a slightly different set of things. Also, if you really want to explore these things using creative, then just go ahead and get credit and start exploring things as we go and you can follow along with me. Otherwise, whatever works best for you is something you're going to learn a ton from if you follow along in the demos. 3. Rebellious Ideas about Color Theory: So before we begin getting into all of the theory, I want to introduce some rebellious ideas that are things that you may have been told or things that you might not even be aware of dealing with color theory. And we're going to explore how we can get around these ideas or incorporate them into our art practice. Now I first want you to think back to your elementary school days and I want to introduce the idea that what you learned in elementary school is way too simple for a working artist. So you might have heard something like, well red and blue make purple. And then he went to the art store and you recognize that you can buy seven different reds and ten different blues and make a bunch of different purples, most of which looked like mud when you try to mix them. So questions you might have her, well, which, which read do I mix together? And which blue and the purple do I get in? Why is my purple so dark and what's going on here? And if you're basing your understanding of color theory on which you learned to elementary school, what you're going to learn pretty quickly as the traditional artist is that these things don't necessarily translate to your Canvas. You may have also heard something where someone says a mix of all the colors is white and then you go home and you mix all your colors together and you get plaque. Well, did you do something wrong? There's something rather interesting about this. And that is the fact that when we're talking about light and mixing together colors of light, do we have an additive color space? That means that all the light adds together to make it brighter. But when you start mixing pixels together, you get a subtractive color space as you mix pigments and everything else together, you're absorbing more light and so you are reducing the amount of light that gets reflected and that's where you're getting black. And so we're going to study why that happens. And when we talk about the science of color theory and how we can use that to our advantage, and how that changes when we're trying to apply a certain color. And now if you go home and you mix all the colors, you get black. You might have also heard someone say, well, the mix of all the colors as black. If you're confused, then hopefully by the end of this course, you won't be rebellious idea number one. Your specific choice of color palette defines the colors you can mix. So this now takes us beyond the elementary school idea of if I have a red, a blue, and a yellow, I can mix anything I want. In this rebellious idea, I want you to understand that choosing a palette of colors is what's going to make it so that you can mix a vibrant green or not, or you can mix a vibrant purple or dark purple or not. And if you choose the wrong color of palette, then you get the rebellious idea. Number 2. Choosing the wrong color palette for your purposes makes it impossible to get what you want. And this is something that happened to me when I went and I bought my fancy paints and I bought colors that just didn't mix for the style of painting that I wanted. Now, what's important to understand is when I say the wrong color palette, I don't mean that there's a single color palette that if you choose it, then suddenly you've done everything wrong and you can't get away from it and you're done for the entire time as an artist, you should just give up and all that sort of stuff. It's not what I'm talking about. Instead, you have an idea in your head of what you want your art to look like. Maybe you really like super vibrant greens when you're painting a landscape and maybe you really want everything to be very, very bright. Well, you can't do that if you buy dark paints. On the other hand, maybe you weren't really dark and moody stuff. Well, you can't do that if you buy neon paints. So what the wrong color palette means is for you and your style. Hopefully by the end of this course, you will have explored a bunch of different color palettes with the stuff that you have at home and you can recognize, oh, I see. When I'm doing, say a landscape, I prefer these three primaries. And when I'm doing something different, maybe something more artistic, I'm going to go and move into these three primaries or whatever happens to be. But I want you to recognize that it is entirely possible to make the wrong choices in the beginning of an artwork. And suddenly you can't mix the colors, right? Rebellious idea at number three, it takes a long time to learn a specific color palette. This is something that's rather interesting and it's difficult, especially when we first go to the art store and we recognize that you can buy every color. You can imagine some paint lines have 70 or a 100150 different colors you can buy. And it's amazing if you restrict yourself and you buy only a couple of colors, maybe some primaries that you really like and you know, you're going to work with well. And then really, really take the time to learn that specific color palette. Learn what happens when you mix in more yellow than blue. Learn how the different greens you can mix and all the browns and everything else. If you take that time to learn it, then once you start adding in more colors to your palette, maybe you go and you buy a convenience color because you always mix it, then that's going to help you a lot. When you finally get to the point where you are exploring new and different colors. But if you don't take the time to learn that specific color palette that you have, those three or four colors, maybe a maximum of six tubes of paint or 66 pastels, whatever it happens to be. If you don't take that time, then you're going to have a much harder time when it comes to mixing with those convenience colors. And that finally brings us to rebellious idea number four, you should stick to a versatile color palette at first and then add more later. In the beginning of my painting career, I bought a set that had 12 paints in it and I had no idea what to do because I started mixing things and they just wouldn't work out. I had so many different options. I want to share with you some amazing wisdom that I got from an art teacher of mine, which is the limitations will set you free. What that means is if you restrict yourself to a small but versatile palate, then you're not staring at 12 or 16 bottles of paint. Or even sometimes you can buy 48 sample bottles of paint AND, and, OR a 120 different colored pencils. You can restrict yourself to only a few. Really, really learn how those things go together and limit yourself and what you can mix so that you can then start exploring all the different colors you can mix. And then once you're really comfortable with that color palette, then you can start moving on. And you can start adding more colors later. And that's going to help you to understand how you can mix things and what happens if you run out of that wonderful orange? What can you make it? Well, if you can, and you only have that versatile palette, then you can start mixing it and not worry too much if you run out of a particular color of paint or color of colored pencil or pastel. So those are the rebellious ideas that they want to get across. Next, we're going to talk a little bit more about the science of color theory and what happens when we actually mixed pigment together. 4. The (very brief) science of pigment mixing: For this quick video, we're going to jump into the science of color very briefly. If you don't want to learn the science of color and you just want to start painting. That's fine too. You can completely ignore this video. But if you're anything like me and you have an analytical mind, I think you'll be really interested in seeing what happens when we mix the colors from a scientific perspective. So let's jump right in. Light is color and the most important thing that you need to understand when you're working with different traditional medium is you're putting a pigment onto the support, but in the absence of light, you won't see anything. Once light hits it, it selectively absorbs and reflects and we see the colors. But if I have is for example, just red light, then what's going to happen if I illuminates something that has no red in it, is, it'll look black. When I illuminate my painting or my drawing with white light, it will selectively absorb and reflect those colors and that's what I see. So why are different pigments, different colors? Why do we even have different colors? In the first place? I want to read you something that is very, very profound. Pigments absorb and reflect different colors. Now the absorption is going to determine what happens when we mix them, the reflectance, It's what happens when we see them. Which colors are reflected is what we call the color of the pigment. So if a pigment releases a lot of red light after being hit with a lot of white light, then you get a red color. This brings us to one of the most profound ideas about mixing pigment, which is called subtractive color. If pigments absorb colors, then what happens when I mix two pigments that absorb different colors? While logically what will happen is they will start to absorb both colors from both pigments. Therefore, if I mix pigments would I'm doing is subtracting light from the unmixed color. So if I have a read that absorbs a blue, and I have a blue that absorbs a red, and I put them together. I'm now absorbing both blue and red. Diving really deep into the science right now, let's take a look at some actual absorption and reflectance spectra. So how you do this? It's very, very cool. And this comes from a fantastic and free website called the Cultural Heritage Science Open Source website. They have a ton of this information on their, on their website where they talk about how different pigments reflect different things. And I've chosen three common pigments. One of them is phthalo blue. At the very top, we have cadmium red or cad red in the middle and we have cadmium yellow on the bottom. And how you read these graphs is as follows. On this end, on the left-hand side we have blues coming in here. We have yellows and oranges, and then we have reds and then we have infrared over here. You can't see this part. So we have blue all the way down to read on the right and then the stuff we can't see. So logically, phthalo blue should reflect blues, and that's what you're seeing. The higher the number, the more you have this reflectance. So phthalo blue reflects a lot of blue and then it starts to drop off. So now we're absorbing things like some greens and yellows and oranges. And some reds. Cadmium red absorbs blue. And we have a spike here which is where the reds are. And cadmium yellow is really interesting because it absorbs a little bit of blue and then it basically starts to reflect more and more and more color, even including over here into the infrared. So cad yellow is a very reflective color in this lower end of the spectrum here. And we can see that we're now starting to reflect the yellows and reds and everything else. We're going to get a sort of an orangey color, which is what cadmium yellow is. Okay. So what are the consequences of all this? I know a lot of people don't love science when it comes to art, but why are we talking about this consequence? Number one, you can never mix a color that is lighter in value than either of you two pigments. Why that is is because if they both absorb light and you mix them together, now you're absorbing more light. You can never, ever mix two colors together and get a brighter color that is a lighter color and value. Then you would have by using the pure pigments. Now you might think you can offset this by adding white. But remember if you do that, then white is a color and you're adding the white in your absorbing stuff from the white and you're making it darker no matter what, you always get darker colors when you mix pigments. And so this is one of the reasons if you start painting and you recognize your paintings are really dark. It's because when you mix things together, they have to become dark. That's how the science works. Now that brings us to a wouldst pure gray. It's a color that both absorbs and reflects all light equally. This is a pure, pure gray, very difficult to make and paint, but normally we get things called chromatic grays, which lane a little bit more towards one color or another. So you might think of gray somewhat weirdly as a dark white. Since white reflects all the colors equally, then a pure gray would reflect and absorb all the colors equally. You get about a 5050 absorbing and reflecting and therefore you have a dark white or if you'd prefer a light black, either way, you get this even distribution of color. Consequence number two. If you mix two colors that absorb different parts of the spectrum, you'll then get a gray. So if I take something that really reflects a lot of blue and no read, and I take another read that reflects a lot of red, no blue, and I mix them together. What that means is I'm absorbing the blue, absorbing the red, I get a gray. And that's why, for example, if you have a cobalt blue and a cadmium yellow or a cadmium red, you try to mix them together, you don't get purple or orange or green. What you end up with is this ugly gray mess. Complimentary colors then, well, we talked about these in a lot of introductory color theory classes. It's when you mix them together, you get great. Examples of complimentary colors are orange and blue, purple and yellow and red and green. But why? Well, let's think about it. If yellow absorbs blue and red, and red absorbs blue and yellow, and blue absorbs red and yellow. Then you start mixing these altogether and you end up with gray. So let's think about what happens when I add yellow and red. If I add yellow and red, then I have something that reflects a little bit of yellow but is absorbed by the red and a little bit of red meat is absorbed by the yellow and both of them are absorbing blue. And so none of them are going to reflect blue and I mix them together. But now what happens when I add in blue? Well, blue absorbs red and yellow. So if I've added my yellow, my red that are absorbing a little bit of the red and a little bit of the yellow. Now I add a blue would strongly absorbs the red and yellow. Suddenly I am absorbing blue because that's what yellow and red does. And I'm absorbing red and yellow because that's what the blue does. And if I add them altogether, I'm going to get a grade. So now, if you think about why these colors are complimentary, look at what happens if you just put these colors together in different ways. Instead of putting yellow plus red would if I had red plus blue, well that should be purple, isn't it? And then I add yellow. So purple and yellow are complimentary. If I add blue and yellow, I get green. If I add red to that, then I end up with a complimentary color. The biggest consequence of all of this, something that you need to take away. And then you can forget about this solid science of color theory completely. You cannot just mix two colors to get a clean third, color. That isn't how that works because they all absorbed things differently. So all pigments will absorb differently. And interestingly enough, all paints will absorb differently as well. So if you have a different binder, for example, you're using a oil that is a little bit more yellow, will suddenly that oil is going to impart its own color to the paints you're using. Similarly, if you have, say, gum arabic and watercolors, or if you have the acrylic binder which looks white but actually dries clear, then what ends up happening is your paints are going to absorb differently even if they have the same pigment. So if you are a watercolor artist transitioning into acrylics, for example, and you really like using cadmium red and watercolor. You should still test out your cad red in acrylics because it's going to give you a different color. Because of all this absorbing. If you choose random colors that are vaguely in the primary set and you try to mix them together, then more often than not, this will result in mud. And that's why what may have happened to you is if you go out and you buy these wonderful artists colors and they look amazing on their own. And then you mix them together and you end up with these dull colors you just didn't want. Because those colors absorb and reflect different parts of the spectrum. And so they're all absorbing each other spectrum and they all look like mud. So hopefully this was important to you. Hopefully you took something away from it. If you don't want to listen to about the science of color, I promise you we will not talk about anymore. But if you're interested in why you keep on mixing mud, this is the video that explains it. 5. Digital Demo 1: Mixing primaries: Okay, so now I have credit open and I want to put this all into practice. And so what I actually did was I went to Wikipedia. Actually wikipedia has some fantastic information with colors and I learned about cadmium red, cadmium yellow, and cobalt blue. And those are the three colors that I have here. And Wikipedia tells you is the color coordinates in a digital painting program. So what happened there was I was able to enter the exact colors into Christa, and I was able to replicate these colors. So this is cadmium yellow medium. This one here is cadmium red medium, and this is cobalt blue. And if you notice, these are the colors we talked about in the previous video about the science of color. And so let's think about what happens when I mix these colors together. And let's use the elementary school understanding of mixing colors. So theoretically what should happen? These are just a red, a yellow, and a blue. And so from what we know from elementary school, if you mix red and yellow, you get orange and let's test that out. So here's how we're going to test it out just so that you can replicate this at home. What I've done here is I put my layer, this is the layer here that I'm, that has all my color swatches. And then above it I have another layer that has nothing on it. I have a regular round brush that has absolutely nothing fancy going on with it. I'm going to select one of my colors and I'm going to paint it over the other two and we're gonna see what we end up getting. Now, you'll see that I have my opacity set to 50 percent. So if you're not familiar with how digital painting works, would it basically means is it allows half of the color underneath to shine through and half of the color on top to shine through. So you don't need to know much about that. And if you're following along with real stuff, all I want you to do is take three different colors that you might call a yellow, a red, and a blue. Put them onto your palette and start mixing them and see what happens. But for now we're going to work in the digital age because it is a little bit easier for us to mix a whole bunch of different things together very, very quickly. So the first thing I'm going to do is take some blue and I do the wonderful color picking tool that critics. So I click on this color kicking tool, the color selector, and I click here. And that's going to give me the color I want. And then there we go. Then I will go back to my brush and I'm going to paint all the way through. So let's see if our elementary school understanding of color theory is correct with zoom in here. And what do I end up with? Let's take a look at a couple of things. I have yellow, I have what we might call it green, and I have more yellow. Now remember the consequences of color theory. Notice how the green is a darker value than the yellow. And that's because cobalt blue is a darker value. Notice how I don't really get a particularly vibrant green. And if you think about why that is, if you go all the way back to the previous video and you look at those colour absorption occurs. The yellow is really absorbing a lot of stuff in the blue. And so if I now add blue to it, I'm going to get this duller green because I'm absorbing a lot of what's coming out of that cobalt blue. And I'm only reflecting very, very few wavelengths of color back at me. And so I'm seeing this dull green color. Let's scroll down. And let's take a look at the purple that I get. So I get a pretty nice purple when I mix these two colors together, I have a purple that I would claim it's something like a violet or a lilac maybe, and it's darker than the red. So that's again, going back to our understanding of color theory. Why is it darker than the red? Well, the reason for that is because we are mixing two colors together and it is absorbing things. But also take a look at how this purple isn't really sort of an astonishing purple. If you take a look over here, this is actually my color selector tool, which is very handy for me. These sorts of purples here, these magenta and things that are really, really vibrant purples are not something I'm getting here. And the reason for that is again, because of those absorption curves. So if I'm absorbing a lot of light that I'm not really reflecting that really strong vibrance. So one key takeaway from that is if you're ever wondering, why is it that the cell purple paint, Why did they sell orange paint? Why did they do any of these things when you can just mix it is because when you mix it, you're losing light. If I have a pure pigment that reflects as much orange, lighter, as much purple light as possible. It's always going to be more vibrant straight out of the tube then when I mix it. Okay, so let's zoom out. I'm going to undo that so we don't have these distracting extra colors. I'm going to choose now yellow. And to do that, I'm actually going to control and click. It's a little bit easier and faster for me. So I'm going to add yellow to both of these. Now let's zoom it. Well, I would argue that that is absolutely 100% and orange, and that's what you would expect when you mix yellow and red together. Now you'll notice if you take a really close look here, it's not a particularly vibrant orange. It's something that is a little bit more dull and a little bit more towards the brown. Why? Well, again, when we're thinking about what absorbs, what if you look at this color here, the red? Notice how it's a little bit cooler. It's a little bit more towards blue. And so if I now mix these two things together, what I end up with is a little bit of a desaturated color because I'm adding a little bit of that complimentary color. Now, as you can probably imagine, when I go and zoom in here, it's about the same green that I got before. And that's because I'm mixing these two pigments together and approximately the same proportions and therefore they are the same. So using what you know now, I want you to take three pigments of your own and start mixing the colors together. And then I want you to see what happens when you mix a yellow and a blue or a yellow and a red predicted first, do you think you're going to get mud with this particular color in your chosen, or do you think that you're going to end up with a nice vibrant color and why? Sometimes you can predict that fairly easily. As an example, if I take a really warm orange, something like a cadmium red and cadmium orange, I'm sorry. And I mix that with a blue. Well, what am I going to expect to get? Those two things are complimentary. Other times it's not quite so obvious, especially because your specific pigment, when your paint manufacturer calls cadmium red, might be completely different from mine calls cadmium red, just because of the different binders and the different pigments that they might be using. Especially for colors that used to be toxic. For example, the cadmium colors, you might have one that is called cadmium red hue or cadmium yellow hue. And that hue means that it's close enough, but it's definitely not cadmium because it's a toxic color. So those are going to be wildly different between different manufacturers. And when you start mixing different things together, you will get very, very different color. It makes it. So that's what I want you to do right now before you go any further in this course, I want you to take a bunch of colors, mix them together, and predict what do you think you're going to get and see if you were right? Do you get mud to get a vibrant color? What happens? 6. Digital Demo 2: Browns and Greys: Alright, so my next step is to see what happens when I add it in. First of all, another color which is black in this case. And second, what happens when I add in some primary colors? So what I'm going to work on right now is mixing brown and we're going to see what happens in the different ways of mixing brown. The first thing you need to understand this, and browns are essentially dark and oranges. And that's something that is really helpful to remember is that Brown is a dark orange. And there are two ways to get to that brown. The first one is you add block, and there are some upsides and downsides to adding black. The first upside is that it's really easy to just reach for a tube of black paint and squeeze it on and mix it in. The downside is a black absorbs a lot of color. And so when you start adding it, it's first of all, very, very strong. It can make your colors way too dark. And second, you're going to start absorbing colors have been at once. So you're calling your brown may look a little bit dull. Another way to produce that kind of ground is to add a blue. Now the downside to that is you may not be able to get as darker brown is you could if you added some black. And there's a third way that produce some ground, which is to buy a brown and a really good ground, for example, might be raw umber, and then suddenly you have a brown you can use. But let's mix it because we're trying to understand how the mixing works. So I have my cadmium yellow and I've made just a swatch of cadmium yellow and then remember that brown and some dark orange. So I'm going to add a little bit of red and you'll see the little bit means 50 percent opacity. So it's like I'm mixing and just a touch of red. And I'm going to put a swatch over here so we end up getting a decent inch. And if you remember this sort of a little bit of a duller orange, then you might want to straight out of a tube, but it is good enough for our purposes. And now I'm going to do two things. I'm going to add some black, but in order to do that, I don't want to add 50 percent opacity. That would sort of be like taking an equal amount of red and black and mixing it to just a little bit over twice that amount of yellow. So that would give you a really, really dark color. In fact, it would give you this color here, which isn't what you want. This is a really, really deep gray. So I'm going to undo that. And I'm going to lower my opacity somewhere to around 20 percent maybe. And now I'm going to add in that. And so this is what you might consider to be your dark brown. So it's turning into a brown. And if I add now more black paint the way you do that because I'm on opacity layer, so I can just add in another swatch. And now I'm really getting to that brown. And if I do it again, I have a darker brown. And again and again, I have this darker, darker brown by adding more and more and black. And so if you want to construct a brown using just those colors, then this is one way to do it. Let's undo this for a second and let's see what happens when I mix. So let's go back into 50%. Add some more red, get myself a nice orange. And then I want to go all the way down and we're going to mix in different amounts of blue and we're gonna see what happens to this orange. The first thing is we're going to mix only 21 percent opacity or so, and I'm going to mix in some blue. Now you'll see it's sort of like a brown, but it's getting more towards a gray or a purplish gray. And that's because when you're mixing in a blue, for example, you're not just getting a pure blue pigment, you're getting all these other things. And cobalt blue in particular is kinda warm, so it's reflecting some reds as well, even though it's also absorbing them. And so you end up with this sort of purplish almost prompt. Let's now add another layer, and now we're really getting into a gray, purple gray. So these special colors are called chromatic grays. And you might expect to get this deep brown, but you're not going to end up getting that even if I were to add more and more, it's just going to turn more and more blue actually, it's going to turn into this sort of now almost The chromatic color. And that's because of the absorption rate. We talked about this in the science is that we are absorbing and reflecting different things. So if I went, I added black, I was absorbing everything and I got a nice brown. When I'm adding this blue, I end up getting something closer to a gray. And no matter how many times I add that blue now I'm getting more and more blue and eventually I'm just going to get to a point where I'm mixing in blue and I'm not getting anything and it's just desaturating. So that's how you can work with complimentary colors, but also adding in a little bit of black in order to get certain color combinations that you want. 7. Digital Demo 3: Chromatic Greys: All right, So the final thing we're gonna do in credit, and then we're going to start moving onto real paint is we're going to talk about something called chromatic grays. And chromatic grays are probably one of the most important color hacks that you can know. If you look around the world anywhere, it doesn't matter where in the world you're, you'll actually notice that most of the colors are not that outstandingly bright and vibrant. In fact, I dare you to go and take a red tube of paint, for example, and paint a large color swatch of red onto a piece of paper. And then go walk around the world and try to find that color, try to match it to different reds. And I'll bet you, you're going to be either unable to do it or when you do find it, it'll be like on a sign, for example, the stop sign. The reason for that is because most of nature's colors are just mixtures of different natural pigments. And all these mixtures absorb and reflect differently. So for the most part we end up with grace. So if you're going out and you're trying to paint something that is landscape or nature or something that you found that you've really interested in, then understanding how to get to chromatic grays is extremely important. So a chromatic gray is basically a dulled down mixture of colors. And we're going to see that from the perspective of orange. And we talked about last video. And then we're going to talk about different chromatic grays we can get with different mixtures. So let's begin by creating some orange. And to do that, I'm going to take some cadmium red and I'm gonna make sure my capacity is 50 percent. I'm going to zoom into my yellow and I'm going to begin with orange. Okay, so now this is a really, really bright color again, especially with oranges, they're fairly rare in nature. So I doubt you're ever going to find something quite like this. And so now let's think about reducing the opacity even to very, very low. And let's think about what happens when I add a compliment like blue. So if you remember about the absorption spectrum, I'm going to absorb different wavelengths of light. So if I add just a touch of blue, what I'm doing is punching down that orange. I'm taking all the stuff that it's really reflecting strongly and I'm absorbing a little bit of it. And that's going to now move me more and more towards a gray. So let's zoom in and let's just 10 percent opacity. I've put it over. And you can already see that what I've ended up with is it's still an orange. It's maybe moving a little bit more towards brown, but it's definitely punched down. It's less vibrant and something maybe a little bit closer to an autumn leaf, for example, although this, I would say it's still pretty vibrant. So let's now add more. And I'm going to try to add it in a smaller way. So as you can see, I'm losing that vibrancy. It's getting darker like it's supposed to. I'm adding more color so it has to get dark. And what I'm ending up with is something that is basically turning into a gray, but you can still see that orange. In fact, if I zoom right in, this is my whole screen now. Well, it's still pretty brown. It's an orangey brown sort of thing. And I think we're getting a little bit closer to those autumn leaf colors. Let's now add a little bit more. And you'll see now I'm really getting close to that gray. So if I zoom in again, then okay. It's still a bit brown, but we're getting definitely closer to the gray. And this now is what we might call a chromatic gray. It's gray with orange in it. It's a little bit brown, but it's mainly a gray if I keep on doing that. And eventually what's going to happen, I'll get to almost a pure gray EOC. I have a fairly warm gray, looks a little bit more like it has some redness. And then if I keep on doing that, eventually I'm going to end up getting blue, which is what I'm, what I'm mixing n, right? So as I add more and more layers of blue, well that blue is now going to block all of the stuff underneath it. And so I get well away from that chromatic gray. But that chromatic gray, if I go back a couple of steps. This gray here is very, very useful if you're say, painting Autumn Leaves are bricks or whatever it is. And the only thing I did there was I added a complimentary color to a mix. So whenever you're listening to someone talking about punching down a color, what they mean is adding in a complimentary color. They mean to desaturate it, make it closer a great, and that's what we're doing here. By adding in these extra complimentary colors, we are reducing the complexity and we are making it so that we have this great. So let's go back now and let's try to make a purple. So I'm gonna go to 50 percent. I'll add some blue in to my red and I get a pretty decent purple. Now again, I really doubt that if you go out in the world, you're going to find a purple that is the vibrancy, something this strong. So we need to add a compliment to make a chromatic grant of that, we're going to go ahead and add the yellow. I'm once again going to reduce the opacity really low to about 10 percent. So you can see what happens as we add in steps. So the first thing I'm going to do is go over the purple completely. So do I still have a purple? Well, yes, I do. If I zoom in, I would argue that is very much a purple. But already what you can see as I've been punched it down a little bit, I've reduced intensity, reduced the saturation. Let's do it again. If I add the yellow now I'm really getting close to a gray. If I zoom in, I still have something like a purple now I'm getting much, much closer to a gray. And what we're seeing is this chromatic gray. So this is something more close to what I would expect to see a nature. Now if again, if I do it again like I did before, I'm going to start getting closer and closer to yellow, right? Because that's exactly what I'm doing, is I'm adding in more yellow. So if I do this again, then now I'm really getting something I would call yellow. That's what happens when you start mixing. If you add too much pigment, well, suddenly you've overshot a bit. So let's go back a couple of steps. Okay, and so this is now what I might consider to be a very, very neutral reddish color, but I think we've lost the purple element to it. We've definitely hit the chromatic gray. So what's really interesting about mixing chromatic grays is that there is something that is very, very vibrant in the sense that it comes together from all of your primary colors that you've chosen on your palette. And so the things that you want to consider is whether your colors work together and whether your chromatic grays makes sense that when they put it on the page, will suddenly they do because they've come from the same palette of colors. This is different from say, just taking a black. And let's do that. So if I take black and I have the opacity down low and I'm mixing it with the background which is white. And now I have this great here and this is a pure neutral gray. And look at how different this is. If I add a little bit more, look at how different this gray is here, which is just pure neutral. This one here is a little bit more purple, little bit more blue maybe. And this one here is a little bit more red. And so these are now these chromatic grays that are going to add a lot more interest than just a basic neutral gray. So whenever you're thinking about looking around the world and saying, okay, let's not exactly a very vibrant green. I can't just take my green straight at the two is because you're going to want to add something to knock it down. And that's what you're going to end up with, is this chromatic gray. 8. Introduction to the demonstrations: Okay, so in this demonstration, I'm going to be using acrylic paint. And I'm going to show you what happens when you mix different color wheels using two different sets of primary colors, again, using acrylic paint. So I am using golden paint here. And I have their heavy body with one set of primaries and then their fluid acrylic with their other set of primaries. And so for the fluid acrylics, I have cobalt blue, cadmium yellow hue, NAP fall red medium. And this is not a great primary set to mix together if you want some vibrant colors. And I'm going to show you why when we start mixing them in the next video. Then here at the bottom I have what they call their primary set. So I have a primary yellow, primary magenta and primary cyan. And so in theory, what can happen if you mix those primary colors together, then you should be able to get almost any color. Now we're going to see that's not exactly true because we've seen that in the science video where we understand that you can't just magically mixed colors and get exactly what you want. We're still not going to get super vibrant purples, for example, just because these primary magenta and primary cyan are rather dark colors. And so when you mix them together, if you're going to get a rather dark purple. Things I had just if you want to follow along and you have something similar in your house. I have a plate. This is the regular plastic plates. My palette. I have a rag so I can wipe off some excess. I have a water cup so that I can put some water in there and wash off my brushes. And I'm actually using watercolor paper because watercolor paper is fantastic for acrylics and everything else. And I like to use it as a cheap background, especially if I'm just practicing. And the particular watercolor paper I use is a Fabriano. It's called the Fabriano fat pad. They are very cheap per sheet and other 25 percent cotton, and this one's a nine by 12. So if you want to follow along with me and have the exact same things, now, I don't recommend that you follow along exactly with what I do. Instead, what I think would be best as for you to go and get some primary colors. Maybe you're using acrylic, maybe it's watercolor. I'll show you watercolor and a couple more videos. Maybe you're even using pastels or something like that. And I want you to do what I'm doing in the sense of making different color wheels. But I don't want you to follow exactly what I have because this is the things that are working for me. And as you'll see with these colors that don't really work for me. These are the colors that I bought did I didn't really choose well, and so they don't mix very well even though they're very good paints. And so I want you to explore your colors with me while I explore my colors and show you how to do that. So in the next video, we're going to make two color wheels, one with the fluids and one with the heavy bodies. 9. Acrylic Demo 1: A poor choice of primaries: All right, so let's get started making that first color wheel. And as you can see, I've poured up some paint. So I have my cad yellow hue, my nap tall red and my cobalt blue. And I want to show you what happens when you make a color wheel these colors. And I'm going to tell you they're not going to mix very well in certain combinations. And let's see y first. So when you make a color wheel, typically you have to make a decision as to what goes on the top, on the bottom and so on. I'm not going to worry too much, but I am definitely going to separate my red, my blue, and my yellow. So let's put some swatches on just of the pure colors. Let's do red first because red is my favorite. And if you take a look here, what you're going to notice if you take a look really closely is that this red is dark and it's a little bit closer to a purple if you're right in front of you and may not be showing up greatly on camera. But if it's right in front of you, you're going to notice it's pretty close to purple. And so that's going to be a bit of an issue when I try to mix it in with my yellow, because the yellow is going to be quite orange and I'll show you that. So let's wash off my brush. Dip it on the rag so I don't have too much paint leftover. And now let's do a swatch of the yellow. So this is a very opaque color and it really does tend towards the orange. And finally, I'm going to put on my blue. And my blue, interestingly enough, is a fairly warm blue. So this cobalt blue here, it's fairly warm, which means it tends towards purple as well. Okay, So these are my three colors that I have just watched. And now I'm going to make a color wheel are more or less a color triangle, I guess we're going to call it where I'm going to start mixing the colors together. So I'm going to mix on my palette and then put them down. The first ones I'm going to do is an orange. And we're gonna see what happens when I mix this sort of cool red with a fairly warm orange. I'm going to take a little bit of paint on my palette and little bit more yellow and mix it together. And what I'm getting is a fairly dark orange, no matter how much cadmium yellow I'm adding, it's still tending a lot towards the red. And if you look at it, it's not a very vibrant orange. There's some undertones of brown in it. And the reason for that again, is because I'm mixing a cool red and warm yellow. There are going to absorb different colors and reflect different color. So my red, my cool red is going to be reflecting a little bit more blue. And my warm yellow is going to be absorbing a little bit more blue. And when you put them together. 10. Acrylic Demo 2: A better choice of primaries: Okay, so now let's take a look at a different set of primary colors. And these are the ones that Golden brand labeled as their primary, so their primary magenta, it's really a red, the primary cyan, and the primary yellow. The first thing I wanna do is put little swatches next to each of the ones that we just did, show you the difference. So if I take this here, you'll see it's a much, much brighter yellow and is much more difficult to tell whether or not that color is cold or warm because it's supposed to be inferior neutral. Now we're going to see it's very difficult to make an exactly yellow pigment, something that is precisely as neutral as you can get. I wouldn't say this one tends a little bit more towards the cool, but not by much. And I'll take some primary magenta as well, put it next to the naphtha read. And again, you're going to see it's a much, much brighter, brighter reds, almost a pink as the color comes through of the paper that's called the undertone. So as you thin it out, you're going to get almost like a pink. And then if I take the primary blue, put it next to the blue here. Again, you're going to see it's a very different blue. It's difficult to pin down whether it's warmer, it's cool. And when we start mixing these things together, we're going to see that that allows us to mix more colors. Now the downside to this palette is that if you want something, you have to mix it. You don't have any rounds, you don't have any convenience colors. Even when we had the liquid colors. When I was taking say, a warm yellow, if I want warm sunset for example, with these primary colors, I'm going to have to mixing red before I start anything else. And whereas I could just maybe use the cad yellow directly from the two with just a little bit of punching down. And so there are upsides and downsides and we will be talking about that in the next video when I bust out my watercolor paints to show you a much more full palette. And we can then start talking about different palettes we can start making. So let's begin by making some swatches again. So we're going to make a read. Wash off my brush every time I don't want there to be too much more paint in there then then otherwise, otherwise they're going to mix already on the color wheel. It was my yellow. Really washing off that brush. And now my blue. Now I really like these colors. First of all, I like them as colors. And secondary is like the paint. It's nice, heavy body. It's really tactile so you can touch your painting. I know you're not supposed to if you wanted to be archival and to last forever. But I do enjoy touching acrylic paintings and really feeling the brushwork. I think it's a lot of fun, especially for just practicing here when we're just making color wheel. So we can definitely start really getting a tactile feel for our paint. All right, So let's begin like we did last time by making some orange. So I'm gonna take my red, little bit more red there. Take some yellow bit more yellow. And now when I mix it together, you're going to see it's a much, much more vibrant orange. There's a lot more going on here. It's looking, well, in this case a lot more red. If I add some more yellow to add, maybe I'll mix up the yellow here. And it looks a lot like we have this orange, almost like a crayola or it's something that comes out of a tube of crayons. And if I put it next to it, again, you're going to see that there's that vibrancy that we didn't get in the other one. Washing off my brush really well now because now I have a lot of mixing going on here. One more time again, if you don't wash off your brushes. So this is another thing. If you want a pure color and you don't wash off your brushes is good and mix on the brush. Sometimes you want that, sometimes you want that moneyness and you want that extra stuff coming on in this case because I really just want to mix up your stuff. I don't wanna do that. So the next one we're gonna do is mix up some, some green, I'm sorry. And so I'm going to take as much yellow as I can and just a touch of the blue. So the blue is a very strong color in this particular set of Palace. And this is something that you're going to learn when you choose your own palette. And let's put this down now between these two. And you'll see that's a much, much more vibrant green color. In fact, if I put it right next to it, this is the other one that we mixed up. It is so much more vibrant. So here I mixed a mud because I was mixing the wrong yellow and blue. Here I'm getting this really nice vibrant color. But what about purple? But here I'm actually going to use a new brush. I think that I don't want to accidentally contaminate anything. So I'm gonna use a new brush that's a little brush here. And I'm going to take some blue right there and a little bit of red. And let's mix it together and see what we end up with. And you're going to see once again, oh, hang on a second. It's really dark, isn't it? No matter what I do, I'm gonna get this dark, dark purple. And when I put it in between, I can almost a black. Now, hopefully if you went back and you watch the science videos and also to get, try to get some undertones here with the white showing through and you'll see it's purplish, but it's very, very dark. And that's because both of these colors, the blue and the red, are very strongly absorb a lot of light other than what they are reflecting. They're the primary colors. That's what they're supposed to do. When you mix them. What you're going to end up with is still this really dark color. So if you want a purple, you're going to have to start from different colors. Now again, if I were to add white into this, I would get a sort of pastel light purple That's mix this one next to the other swatch that we made. So it's definitely going to be darker. I'm not really going to be able to fix this by say, adding more red to it. So I'm going to get a little bit lighter. My rate is a bit lighter, but I'm still getting this super dark purple. And again, that's because of what these paints absorbed. So if you want a purple, the actual answer is to use something around the lines of a rose which isn't quite a pink. Just keep this in mind. It's not a red and a white. It's its own separate pigment that when you finally mix it in with the blue, is going to give you that vibrant purple because they rose is a much lighter color. So these are my two acrylic color wheel. Next step, I'm going to take some water colors out and I'm going to show you a much more full pallet and what you can do with it. 11. Watercolor Demo: Okay, so now I'm gonna do a little bit with watercolor. Now, you'll see that I have a palette of 12 colors, and I also brought in a permanent rose. So I promised you that I'd show you how to do some purples and that's what we're gonna do. I am not going to make every single possible different color wheel, but I want to explain to you why these 12 colors exist in this palette. This is a sub coracoid, watercolors Pocket Field Sketchpad. But you'll actually find, if you go to say, a Walmart or even a craft store and you buy some paints and you'll see them in acrylics or watercolors or oils or guage, you almost always have very similar 12 colors. And the question might be, well, why do I have these colors? Does it make any sense? These colors are chosen for a very specific reason. And every one of those 12 sets is going to have something extremely similar. Now you'll notice that I have a white, this is actually a white goulash. You can't really make a white watercolor. So I very rarely used the white, but in any other dogs and mixing sense, especially if you've got those 12 states, like there'll be acrylic for example, oils, you'll have a white paint and that'll be much more useful there. So we're not going to use it. But let's take a look at what I have. I have two yellows, two reds, two blues. And in my case I have two greens. And then these two colors here, and we'll talk about those colors in a moment. They are quite special there my earth tones. So every set you have is going to have that to yellow to red to blue combination and then something else. And that will depend on very strongly with the SAT is this is the warm and cool version of each primary color. And that's why your sets, those 12-step always have those doubles because you have a warm version and a cool version. And so we could use that information to decide on a colored palette. And this is where we start talking about your class project. Let's say you have one of these 12 sets, or let's say you have a decision to make which colors you going to buy. Or even if you just have some colored pencils or pastels, whatever it is, the question is, which ones are you going to use most often? Which are you really going to learn? Because learning how to use a specific subset of your colors is going to be hugely important. It's why I only really work when I'm working in acrylic with three colors, those primaries. Sometimes I'll add in a little bit of the browns and then of course white because you have to, because it's just so much useful. But for my watercolors, what I did when I started learning my watercolors, because restrict myself very strongly to a palate made up of only three colors. And then I really learned how those mixed together. Once I did that, then I started adding in all the other stuff to get more vibrancy that I wanted and to have some more convenience. Those three colors, strangely enough, aren't what you might think. So I didn't use the primaries that I was given except for this blue here. This is called a Prussian blue. And then I also use this yellow, which is yellow ocher, and this red which is red oxide, basically it's rust. And the reason I use these, Let's take a look at what they do. So I have two things of water here. One of which is clean water, one of which is for my, my brush. So I'm going to dip some water in. I'm going to take a little bit of yellow ocher. Let's make a color wheel based on these colors. So my yellow ocher comes in here and you'll notice already it looks like a dirty yellow. So why would I want this? Well, it depended on what I was doing. And at that time, I was doing a lot of urban sketching. And when I walked around my neighborhood, I just happened to realize that in my neighborhood there was a lot of these dirty yellow bricks, literally earth bricks that are made of sand I guess. And some red bricks like this one here, which is my red oxide or my bright red is also the with the pigment is called. And then I added in this, this blue here. And this blue is a really intense, very dark blue, especially if you add it in any quantity. So let's take a look at what happens when I make it really nice and thick in there. And this Prussian blue, it allowed me to start neutralizing colors. So if you remember back to this color wheel here where I got these ugly, muddy colors that I didn't want it because I wasn't really trying to paint those things yet. When I start with these, this is basically what I call my earth tone palette. These colors here allow me to get some really nice graze, which when you're doing a lot of urban sketching, a lot of buildings, a lot of streets. They're going to be great. So let's start mixing things together and let's see what I get with this palette. So I'm going to add a little bit of yellow ocher. And I'm going to put this into my palette because I want to mix it here. And I'm going to clean off my brush. Now watercolors a lot easier to clean off. They just dissolve and I'm going to take my water again and take some of my red oxide there. And now I'm going to mix them together. And let's see what I end up with. Do I get an orange? Well, not really right, because I'm already starting with these dirty colors. But when I add them together, I get this wonderful brick color that I can use. Wash it off again. Let's see what kinds of greens I can make. And this is where this palette really shines, I think, because the greens are not intense, I can promise you that we're already dealing with this colors that are wrong. Water are dealing with these colors. Are already sorted money on their own. And now I take this and I mix it in. And what do I end up with? For my green color? I get a muted blue. And if I add a little more of my yellow ocher to that, I'm going to start getting, I'll put this one up top. Really nice foliage type green. And you'll notice, let's put it beside the muddy color. It still has that vibrancy because these two colors might be the neutral earth tones, but this color here is really giving it a bit of a punch. And so I get a little bit more vibrancy, but I have this almost like a gray green, which is going to really, really help me to get some foliage in the background of trees. For example, when I mix these two colors, I get something really, really good, which is a nice dark, neutral ish brown. Let's see what happens and sometimes even grade depending on how much I can do. So if I take these two colors and I mix them together, what I'm ending up with a really nice brown color. So my purple, so-called purple, is this brownish black. Okay, so how does all of this come together for your class project? What I want you to do is choose a palette. So how do you choose a palette? Well, the first thing you need to look at is what is it that I'm painting here, this palette I chose very carefully because when I walked around my neighborhood, when I was trying to do at urban sketching, I looked at it and said, I need these earth tones. I need neutral colors. So I should start with neutral colors. So it's what I did. I started with these two colors which were yellow, yes, but again, neutralized and punch down red again, similarly neutralized and punch down. There were literally earth tones. These ones come from a rock based pigments. And then because I needed a primary set because I want to be able to mix, I had to have a blue. Now if you take a look at my two blues, this one here is a really dark and again somewhat muted down. This one is a cobalt blue. And if I take my cobalt blue and I'm going to get this super bright color when it mixes in. I got the ugly greens. I don't really want so I had to practice with that. I had to test out different sets of primary colors from my palette and see what I could get when I had this palette here, my primary palate, which is something that I use when I do acrylics a lot. The reason I chose the primary palate is because you can mix very many colors. It's extremely versatile. You take a look here, I really can't get a nice bright orange from this. I really can't get a nice bright green. I can start to get this muted earth tone green. But if I want that green, I simply can't get it. So I'm going to have to either in my watercolors, Explorer, this part of my palette, the actual greens or maybe some brighter colors. Or typically when I'm doing acrylics, I want as few tubes of paint as possible. That's a personal choice. And so I use the primary palette. This set here, I actually very rarely used, but when I need a cool red, I have a cool red. When I need a really warm, opaque yellow, I have a warm and I'll pick yellow. And similarly, when I need that warmish blue, I have a warmish blue, but I very rarely use the set because this is a slide I talked about in the beginning of the course. As I said, I went on but it was really excited for my second set of artist quality paints and I couldn't get them to mix. So I promised you I'd show you also some purple and purples. Typically either you have to buy it too or you have to mix it with very specific colors. And that's what we're doing with permanent groups. Oops, there we go. So I'm gonna take a little bit of permanent rose. And let's just watch the permanent rose for a second. Let's see what this looks like on its own. I take some water, and this is a watercolor. If I take the permanent rose, you'll see this doesn't really line up with any of the other colors that I have. It's not a read. It's sort of a pink, but not really if you think about what a pink as you might think about something more pastel. And so that's not what I have here. I have a permanent rose, I have its own color. And now if I'm going to take some cobalt blue, Let's take a lot of cobalt blue here, and let's mix them. And suddenly now I have that vibrant purple that I just didn't have before. I couldn't end up with a vibrant purple because it just wasn't working. If I add in more of the rows, I get an even more vibrant purple, I get something that I might want to paint flowers with. So let's summarize in the next video about all of these things and what you're gonna do in your class project. 12. Class Project: All right, The time has come to think about your class project, which is to do some color wheels and choose your palette. Now, again, whatever medium you're going to use is the medium you're going to use. I'm not going to force you to say use acrylics and you have to buy golden acrylics, doesn't make a difference is whatever you've already been using. I want you to go out and take those things and start thinking of different ways to mix them and seeing what happens. So the first thing I recommend it, if you only have three paints, that's great. If you only have a red, a yellow, and a blue, well, it's suddenly you don't have as many choices to make. You can make a single color wheel. And then what you're gonna do is start learning exactly how you can start mixing all those colors to get different shades and different hues. How you do that is you mix in different quantities of each color. If you haven't chosen your palette yet, which is what you're gonna do eventually. And you have maybe you're 12 set or you have a bunch of other tubes. I want you to start thinking in threes. So take three colors which are going to be a primary set. Let's say that I do have this set of 12 watercolors. Maybe I'm going to start with this yellow here, it's there, you've lemon yellow. And I'm going to add to it the earth read the restaurant. And I'm going to add Prussian blue. And I want to see what happens when I mix these things together. Do I end up with nice colors? Well, let's take a look. We're here now. I'm going to wash off my brush. Some of this lemon yellow. Take some of my Prussian blue, mix it together. And I get an interesting see color. And then maybe I'm going to take another set of primaries. Maybe I now take my Prussian blue and my yellow ocher, and I mix them together and I see what I end up with that what you're trying to do is make as many different color wheels as you can think of combinations for your primary colors. So for example, I have 123123123 and so on. So I can keep on mixing up different sets of primary colors. And this set of 12, I have a ton of different color reals I can make. Why I'm doing that is because then I'm going to narrow them down. I'm going to look at all those color wheels on a sheet of paper. Ideally label them and make a decision about which one stands out best for you. That doesn't mean you can never use the other colors. What it means is you're going to look at those coloring and say this is a palette. I really like. I think I can get a lot of different mileage out of this one. And then you're going to start working on mixing up different ratios of the colors to see the entire gamut of colors you can get. That's going to be your primary palate for at least the next couple of paintings are in the next couple of drawings, whatever it is you're going to do. How you're going to use it is to choose something you really want to draw. It could be simple like a cubic, could be as expansive as a landscape. And you're only going to use those colors to start with. So you're going to try to get as much color down onto your page using those three colors. Once you have something that you're okay with, and maybe you want a little bit more vibrant green, okay, now add in one extra color a little bit more. But I want you to really learn that palette. Because then it's going to form your go-to and you're going to look at colors and say, Well, I know how to mix that. I just have to take these two colors, mix them together, add a little bit more water and maybe a touch of blue. And suddenly you can see colors in your environment because you've really learned that palette. And because you've really understood concepts like blue and red, when you mix them together, doesn't necessarily give you purple. So I want you to go and do that. I want you to post to your color wheels and I want you to post your projects down below. And I would love to give you some feedback. Thank you so much for watching this course and I hope you learned a lot about color theory.