Capturing Colors: Watercolor Mixing and Matching in Real Life

1. Class Intro: Have you ever wanted to develop a sophisticated sense of color? Do you want to get better at mixing watercolor and matching the color of things from real life? In this class, you will learn the basics of color theory through fun and practical exercises that will have you matching the colors of real objects around you? My name is Marley Pifer, and I have been helping people like you learn watercolor for almost ten years? In that time, I have painted thousands of watercolor subjects, mostly outdoors in nature, and I have made hundreds of instructional videos on my YouTube channel? This class, I will help you truly develop the skill of color mixing. Here are the main things you will be learning in this class, how to accurately mix colors to mask things in real life. Which colors are friends and which are enemies, the practical side of color theory and how to control your colors and fix common painting mistakes. This class is designed specifically for beginner or intermediate watercolorists, who want to improve their watercolor mixing abilities. However, it will also be good for anyone who wants to improve their understanding of color in art and design in general. For more advanced students or anyone who wants to push their learning further, there will be extra credit exercises at the end of each section. Are you ready to take your color to the next level? 2. Class Orientation: I think you're going to be surprised by your results when you do the project for this class. The project is to create three color wheels in a page full of color swatches and mixes. While the goal of this project is mostly to build your skills more than to create a work of art, it can have a surprisingly enjoyable aesthetic effect. You might even want to hang your project on the wall. This type of project will jump start beginners and provide lots of flexibility for more advanced students. Let's talk about supplies. For this class, you will need a basic sketchbook. It can have mixed media or watercolor paper. You can work on loose sheets if you must, but keeping all your work in a single sketchbook is much more fun and fulfilling in my opinion. One page will be needed for your project, and one or two pages for warm ups and all of your color tests. You will also need a watercolor set. I will be using the Windsor and Newton Cotman field set for this class. It is an entry level watercolor palette that can work for the studio and in the field. A lot of the specific learnings from this class will be a lot easier if you have the same palette as me. You can see the supplies list in the resources section for more info and links about all of the supplies. You will also need a rag or a paper towel and a basic drawing tool such as a pin or a pencil. The other really important piece is a water brush. You can use a regular traditional watercolor brush, but I will be using one of these water brushes with water in the built in reservoir. Where are the resources? There are some resources that I've put together to help you with this class. If you scroll down underneath this video, you should see four categories. One says about, one says project and resources, one says reviews, and one says discussions. Inside of the project and resources, you can see the other projects that people have uploaded and upload your own. And you can also find the PDF downloads that I have created for you. Once you have the class resources downloaded or printed out, then all you need is to get your art materials ready to go and have a nice place to work. For the color matching projects, ideally, you should work from objects that you find around you or outside nearby. If not, you can use examples from the resources section. Are you ready? Let's go. 3. Swatching Out Your Palette: The first part of our project is super fun, super easy, and is a great way to build some familiarity with your watercolor palette. We're going to swatch out our entire palette. All you need is your watercolor palette. Hopefully, you have the same one that I'm using. If not, it's okay, but ideally you have this cotton watercolor palette check the resources, a rag to clean your brush on, and a water brush. You can use a traditional watercolor brush, but then you'll need something to hold water in. Alright, let's get started. All you need to do is load up your brush with the first color, which is mon yellow hue. And as you go, remove a little bit of color as you go and make it paler and paler. The next color is cadmium yellow, and then cadmium red. So I am using my rag to remove some of the pigment after a first couple of squares, and it gets paler and paler, and that way you can see the range of intensity you can get from each color. Usually in watercolor, you're not going straight from the pigment onto your page. Our next two colors were after cadmium red. We had alizarin crimson and then permanent rows. You can see the resources section for more info about the specific colors. So here you can see how I'm using the rag to remove some color after a couple of squares, just to make sure that I have a consistent increase in how pale the color is. This green is Vidian green, and now I'm going on to Sap green. And you can see it's starting to build an enjoyable aesthetic effect. You're getting a lot of practice with your brush, a lot of practice, with your watercolor kit. You're getting an idea of where all the colors are, how they relate to each other, and what kind of value range you can get from them. This practice of swatching out your palette is a really, really good way to get to know your palette and have a better understanding of what is in it. I recommend this whenever you get a new palette. It's also a meditative practice, and I feel like it creates something rather beautiful at the beginning of any sketchbook. Here's what you learned in this lesson just by swatching out your palette. You learned how the colors in your palette behave. You should be a lot more familiar with your palette now. You also learned how your colors look at different intensities. You also practiced some skills. You practiced loading the brush with pigment. You practiced controlling the pigment level on the brush, and you practiced cleaning the brush a lot of times. The extra credit for this lesson is to make a color mixing chart showing all the two way mixes between the colors and your palette. 4. Color Theory Wheel Goes Round and Round!: All right. This is one of my favorite parts of this class. And while color theory sounds well, very theoretical, it's actually extremely practical. When you have to match colors in nature or make a pink slightly less pink or figure out what a good combination of colors is. It's going to really help if you have a basic understanding of the color wheel. So in this lesson, we're going to practice that and more. Measuring anything or trying to draw a perfect circle can be major mental obstacles. So I wouldn't worry too much about making a perfect circle or having all the angles correct in your triangle, as you can see, mine are pretty loose. So don't worry too much about measuring things perfectly. Also, keeping it small is going to be helpful. If you make a really big color wheel or a very wide area that has to be colored in, that's going to make it a lot harder as well. So keeping it small and keeping it loose is going to help a lot. So get your watercolor palette, your brush, your sketchbook, and a mug or some cups from your kitchen, and let's get The first thing we're going to do is trace three wheels on our page. A lot of mugs, cups, and even plastic bottles, will have two different size circles on them. So you can see I use the bottom of this mug to trace a smaller circle inside the first circle. Don't worry about making it perfect. I'm a perfectionist, and keeping it loose and small helps me actually finish this project. Once you have those three wheels traced, it's time to go on to the first color wheel, which we're just going to put the primaries in lemon yellow hue, and permanent rose and Ceran blue hue RR primaries. And there are primaries from this palette because they're the ones that most allow us to create our secondary colors. Once you paint a little bit of lemon yellow hue, permanent rose, and Ceran blue hue here, draw a triangle to show how those primaries are related to each other across the wheel from each other. Some people might be asking, Why did I choose these three for primaries? Why didn't I choose cadmium red or alizarin crimson? Some people might think that red is a primary color, and that's what we were often taught in school. But the thing that makes a primary color a primary color is its ability to make the secondary colors. If you use the permanent rose for your primary red, it's easier to get good purples and good oranges. And if you use the serlean blue, it's easier to get a blue green, a violet, and also a yellow green. However, if you use that other red for your primary, you don't get a very good orange, and you definitely don't get a very good purple. The definition of a primary color is that you're able to make all of the other colors from that primary color. If you can't make the other colors from that primary color, then it's not actually a primary color. Okay, this next one's going to be a little bit of a challenge. Start off by pre wetting the entire circle with a clean brush, water. Now go to lemon yellow hue and put it in in its normal location at the top of the color wheel, but taper it off a little bit at the edges. See how I make it a little bit paler at the edges. Next, get your permanent rose. Put it in in its normal position, and then also taper it off on the edges and try to overlap that yellow a little bit. And then on the bottom, overlap it and taper it out a little bit where it can overlap with your next primary color, which is that seran blue hue. Taper that one off at the edges and try to mix it into the permanent rose to create your purple, and then mix it into your lemon yellow hue to create your green. As you can see, we got pretty good greens, purples, and oranges, meaning that our primaries work as primary colors. The next thing we're going to do is just write in the names of the colors that we used. And then we're going to draw a triangle showing where the primaries are, a triangle showing where the secondaries are, and then a, I think it's a hexagon showing where the tertiaries are. Then we're going to go in and put initials for what all of those colors are. So basically yellow, green, yellow, orange, blue, green, et cetera. Creating these shapes is going to help you understand the relationships between all those colors. This is a really good test to do with any watercolor palette or oil paints or acrylic paint palette that you have, because it will tell you if those primaries are real primaries or not. If you can't mix secondary colors like a good purple, such as that from your primaries or a good green, such as that from your primaries, then they're not actually primary colors. The final color wheel that we're going to make is just placing all of the colors from our palette onto the color wheel in their respective places. Starting with the primaries that we already identified, lemon yellow hue, the permanent rose, and the cerulean blue hue. And then going on to the rest. What we're going to find out is whether there are gaps in this palette or whether there are certain things that there's almost too many versions of, such as sort of red oranges and red seem over represented in this palette. So we'll just go through and after you get those primaries, try to fill in the rest of the circle, but notice where there could be gaps. Are all of the secondary colors represented? One of the main things I noticed when doing this exercise is there's no real purple in this palette. So you can see there's a big gap at the bottom part of the wheel, where purple would normally go. What are some of the things that we just learned in this lesson? We learned how to identify primary and secondary colors, not just to use those terms, but to actually identify them on our own and what they mean. We learned how primaries, secondaries, and tertiaries all relate to each other. And we also got familiar with the colors in our watercolor palette and where the major gaps are. So, now, for your extra credit, you can make another one of the spectrum wheels using the warmer versions of yellow. Red and blue. So, in that case, it would be cadmium yellow, cadmium red and ultramarine blue, instead of the ones that we used. What do you notice if you use these as if they were primaries? Are they really primaries? That's your exer credit assignment. 5. Make a 50/50 Color Mix : This lesson, we're going to do a simple 50 50 mix between Serian blue hue and Varian green to see what kind of color we can make from combining those two. And we're going to learn how to do it in an organized way, so we can learn as much as possible and improve our understanding of our watercolor palette. This is a useful thing to know how to do when you need to fill an empty space in your palette where you don't have a color that fits in that space or whenever you need to make a new color, which is something we're going to build on a lot in this class. All right, to make a simple 50, 50 cross, meaning it's equal parts of each color, I'm going to start with getting my brush really clean and preparing my first color. Once I get my cerlian blue hue ready, I clean the brush really well again, and then I'm going to get my Vidian hue ready and put it in a separate area. And you can see I'm sort of measuring them out before I mix them together. Now that I've mixed them together, I can tell that I should have first put little squares showing the two colors that I'm mixing, and that's what I'm doing here. Now, my mix came out a little bit strong on the green side. That's because Verdan hue is a stronger pigment than the Serlian blue hue. Now just like we did swatching it out, I swatch it out so I can see the variation. Now I'm going to try adding a little bit more cerlian blue hue to the mixture, and I'm making notes there in my swatches that I've added more of the cerlian blue hue to get a little bit more of a turquoise color. When making these basic crosses, it's good to have a system of annotation. Here I have the original color, the Serlian blue hue, and here I have the Veridian hue that mix to make this one right here. So those are the two colors that go into this one. Then I also put the initials of the colors underneath. And then I added more cerlian blue hue to this one, and that creates this one here. It's taking that mix from above and Using that plus mark, I show that I just added a little bit more color. Taking good notes when you do these mixes is going to help you learn faster. The main things that we learned in this lesson were how to do a simple 50, 50 color mix between two colors that are already in our palette. So we also learned how to modify that color a little bit closer to one of the primaries because we were mixing these two colors right here, and this is one of our primaries. We also learned how some colors are stronger than others, because even though we used equal amounts of the Serlian blue hue and the Vidian, our first mix looks a lot more like the Vidian than the Serlian blue hue. Those are all really useful things we learned in this simple mixing exercise. Extra critic, you can try variations of mixes with more blue or more green, such as a 60 40 or an 80 20 mix. You can also try to do a chart of all 50 of all 50 50 mixes possible with whatever palette that you're using. That's a lot of mixes, and it's a fun exercise, but can be really time consuming. 6. Why Is My Sunset Ugly? : Sunset paintings often come out bad, and we are about to learn why. But we are going to have to understand saturation and complimentary colors first. Saturation is the strength and purity of a color. A lot of times people will just say that's a very bright color. That's probably saturated. The closer it is to a primary or a secondary color, chances are it's more saturated. The less white, gray, black, or brown, the more saturated it is. Sometimes saturated colors even look unnatural. However, sunsets need saturated colors. That's what makes them so beautiful. Sunsets are also beautiful because they have complimentary or close to complimentary colors. The problem is when these frenemies mix in ways you weren't expecting, complimentary colors are opposite to each other on the color wheel. When they mix, they often neutralize the saturation. By definition, they neutralize the saturation. So, for example, a blue sky and an orange sun. Those are opposite to each other on the color wheel. Here is blue, and here is orange. Those are complimentary colors. So when they blend, they're going to neutralize each other. Blue sky plus yellow or blue sky plus yellow sun will equal green, and there's not normally green in the sky. So to practice and internalize these concepts, we are going to do some front exercises that I like to call cross washes. The first thing I'm going to do, which is really important is get my brush really clean. That's always good when you're doing experimental mixing of colors. I'm also probably going to use two brushes for this, and I'm going to experiment pre wetting the paper. Now I'm going to get my cilian blue hue, which is my sky color, paint it down and fade it out, and then I'm going to paint the lemon yellow hue up from the bottom and fade it into the blue. Now I'm doing the same with cadmium yellow hue. And now I'm going to do the same, see pre wetting it, Seran blue hue again for the sky, and this time, cadmium red. So I'm basically just going to do this with all of my potential sunset colors with my sky color cerliu blue. That's alizarin crimson right there, and last but not least permanent rose. Don't forget to take careful notes when you do this of all the different colors that you use each time. Now we have a really useful chart showing us how all of these complimentary colors and frenemies mix together. Look how the cadmium red really turns brown, and the cadmium yellow and lemon yellow hue turn really green. This zarin crimson and permanent rose look pretty good, though. Now I'm going to do an experiment where I keep the frenemies separate and put a pink or sarin crimson in the middle, permanent rose this time. So I paint down with the blue, keep an open space in the middle, and then use cadmium yellow for a sun, and then put a little bit of permanent rose in the middle and then blend it in both directions. This keeps the blue and the yellow separate and prevents me from having that ugly, green or brown color in the sky. Sunsets are a extremely challenging subject that many beginner water colorists tackle without having a basic understanding of these color theory concepts that you just learned. Hopefully, you won't make the same mistakes that they do now that you understand complimentary colors, saturation, and frenemies. A couple pro tips for dealing with these situations is to either not paint sunsets at all, control your expectations. Keep the yellow and blue separated, use cooler reds or pinks or try using two brushes. Those are a couple extra tips to help you out. However, there are times where you want things to be less saturated. See the lesson on kindergarten green for more on how to tone down a saturated color on purpose. To summarize what we learned in this section, we learned why sunsets are challenging, what is saturation, and what are complimentary colors. The extra credit for anyone who wants to take it to the next level is to try painting a real sunset from a photo or in real life and apply what you've learned in this lesson. 7. Yellow is Weak but Where is Orange? : In this lesson, we're going to take a deep dive into the warm colors from yellow to magenta. And one of the things that we're going to learn is that yellow is a weak color and is easily contaminated by any other colors in your palette. We're also going to learn the difference between cool warm colors and warm warm colors. And then we're going to have a test where we have to match colors from real life. I'm going to swatch all these colors out again for practice and for fun. You don't have to, but remember, it's like practicing scales. Doing this will make you better. One thing you might notice in doing this is there is no orange. Since yellow is a weak color, I'm gonna clean my palette really well before I start mixing any of these colors. Since this watercolor palette doesn't come with an orange, we're going to have to mix our own. First, let's try with the cool warm color. So lemon yellow hue and alizarin crimson doesn't make that great of an orange. Now let's try with cadmium red and cadmium yellow, which are the warm warm colors. And you'll see we get a much better orange. That's why a lot of palettes will have multiple versions of these colors, a warmer one, and a cooler one. Now that we practice those oranges a little bit, we're going to practice warm colors from real life citrus. I'm going to start with this regular orange right here. There's some color variation on it, but let's see if we can match it. First thing to try would be to clean the brush. Now I'm going to take a little bit of this cadmium yellow, which I just polluted slightly, clean it up there, tiny bit. And let's see how close that looks to our orange. It's close, but it's not quite right. So let's use some of our skills to modify this color a little bit. And what do you think I should try? Maybe I could try it similar to what we used here where we added a little bit of cadmium red. So I will go ahead and take some cadmium yellow, put it here, and then now I'm going to get clean my brush and get some cadmium red, not a ton, just a little bit. And let's see what we can do with that. It's not quite strong enough, but it looks like a pretty close match. So let's mix up a little bit more, starting with the cadmium yellow. Clean off the brush again, get some more cadmium red, but not a ton. I think mostly cadmium yellow. I would say that is pretty close to the color of this orange. But just for fun, I'm going to try a cadmium yellow mixed with one of the other reds. Let's see what happens if we take cadmium yellow. And this is the kind of thing that I would be doing in the field if I were doing watercolor painting in the field and having to match colors that I see out there. And now let's try it with alizarin crimson. Let's see what kind of orange we get there. Hey, you know what? That actually looks pretty good. It's less saturated. I think it actually matches a little bit better. Y. So let's pretend we're gonna paint like a full orange here. Let's call that good, but let's make some notes there. So this was Cadmium yellow by itself, Cadmium yellow plus cadmium red, and this was cadmium yellow plus alizarin crimson. And everything was fine until a few minutes later when the watercolor finally dried showed its true color. Now this orange is no longer a very good match for that orange. So that's a really good lesson. Is that watercolor changes its color as it dries. I would definitely go back and alter this next time. Next, I'm going to match the color of this limon. But let's be serious here and specific with our colors. It's very easy to do the kindergarten cran error and just grab the yellow, whichever yellow because you know this is yellow. But we're getting more sophisticated in our understanding of color. So is this a cooler yellow or a warmer yellow? And does the color change at all on different parts of it? So, I would say this is a cooler yellow, and it's probably pretty close to our primary yellow, which means we don't have to actually mix a color for it, but let's not get lazy. Let's test it out. And see if this limon, yellow hue actually matches our limon. I think ours is probably a little bit less saturated. We could try putting a little bit of cadmium yellow in there and seeing how that works. But if you put that side by side with that limon, that doesn't totally match that color, and that's why you're taking this class because you want to have a more sophisticated understanding of color and an ability to actually match things from real life. So we're not going to stick with this. That's not good enough. We're going to try limon yellow hue. And maybe do like 20% cadmium yellow to start and see what that looks like. Get my brush really clean and then go into this cadmium yellow, not a ton, and let's see what that looks like. And I would say that already looks a lot better. So don't be complacent with your colors when it looks like you have a perfect match. Try to be precise and exact, and what this will do is it will train your brain to pay more attention, train your brain and your eyes to pay more attention to colors way more than the average person. This lemon was a perfect example of a cool warm color, and the orange, a warm warm color. This lesson you learned how to keep your yellow pure, how to mix oranges from the primaries and how to match citruss in real life. Your extra credit homework is to make a spectrum going all the way from green to orange or oranges red with all of the colors in between. Sort of like the spectrum we did in one of our first color wheels. 8. Kindergarten Green?: Did you know that green is the most dangerous color right out of your palette? In this lesson, we're going to learn how to ruin a painting with kindergarten green versus how to look carefully and accurately mix colors that match green in real life. First, let's swatch out the greens that we already have in our palette. So I'll start with this Vidian green. As you can see, that's a relatively blue green. Next, I'm going to do sap green. As you can see, that's a yellow green, not very saturated, and it's a relatively weak color. Neither of these greens in our palette look like the kindergarten green that I'm talking about. Here's my other watercolor palette. You can see that it's called Hooker's green is a good example of a kindergarten green. It's a very saturated secondary color. This is a common color in many palettes, markers, crayons or colored pencil sets. It is basically a pure secondary green. I call it kindergarten green because when you are 5-years-old and want to draw a tree, you grab this color and use it indiscriminately. Unfortunately, many people who are no longer in kindergarten continue to use this color almost as a symbol to represent any plant. That is unacceptable. Despite being dangerous, when used directly, this color is very helpful for mixing other colors, and it appears that this color is missing from our cotton palette. We're going to have to try to mix it. This color wheel that we made earlier actually already showed us that there was a gap here in our greens in addition to the gap in our purple. We already knew we were missing that kindergarten green. First, I will try to mix it from our primaries. I'll Make sure my brush is very clean and get a portion of lemon yellow hue in the mixing area that I can use without having to go into the pan with the water color each time. I'll get a bunch of the lemon yellow hue all ready to go. Now I'm going to do the same with Serlian blue hue, which is our primary blue. Try not to drip it on your yellows and oranges like that. Now in a separate mixing area, I'm going to take some of the yellow and some of the blue and mix them together. I'm trying to clean my brush each time so I don't contaminate my sources of the pure colors. Then I'm just going to swatch them out. I'm not super impressed by the color that I got, the green I got by mixing those primaries. It's okay, but it's definitely not like that kindergarten green, so I'm going to experiment with it a little bit. Since mixing from our primaries didn't create a kindergarten green. What I'm going to do instead is I'm going to take the green that's in our palette already that's closest to kindergarten green. In this case, V, and I'm going to add our yellow lemon yellow hue to that and see if that makes more of a primary green. That is a much more convincing green and we got it just by adjusting our Vidian hue with some of our lemon yellow hue. Next, we're going to make more of that color and then practice toning it down or controlling it. Knowing how to tone down a kindergarten green is going to be a super helpful watercolor skill for you in the future. First, I'm going to take some of this kindergarten green and put it in here. Then I'm going to clean my brush. The first thing we're going to do to tone it down is we're going to use panes gray. That's this gray right here in the bottom of your palette. It's supposed to be a pretty neutral gray. We're going to take that. We're going to take a little bit of that and mix it into this kindergarten green right here and this is what we get. This color is something you're much more likely to see in nature. You could do all different variations of how toned down it is. I could even take some of this and add it back to my original one there and just tone the kindergarten green down a little bit less that time. Those are all versions toned down with panes gray. Another way to tone down a green. We've got our kindergarten green mixed right here. Another way to tone it down is to use a complimentary color. Across the color wheel across the color wheel from our green is basically going to be this permanent rose or a lizard crimson. You can see straight across. It's a complimentary or close complimentary, and we'll grab that one. Let's try a permanent rose and see how that works for toning it down. Here's a permanent rose in my palette. I'm going to take a little bit of that, not too much. And put it here next to my kindergarten green. I'm going to mix that in. If you do too much, it will turn to brown. Once again, we get a more interesting, sophisticated and natural looking green. This one's even more interesting, I think, than the last one, probably because a lot of times you get cool colors or interesting colors when you mix the complimentary, when you tone down with the complimentary color. Let me just take some notes here and put some of this permanent rows. And do I have any pure Kindergarten green left? Kindergarten green? That was perfect preparation for what we're going to do now, which is try to accurately match and pay attention to the greens on a house plant or a leaf that you can find near you. If you have to, you can work from this one, ideally, you can find a house plant at home or a leaf near where you live. Got my plant right here, and the first thing I'm going to do is clean my palette really well. Then I'm going to clean my brush really well. And then I'm going to create areas in my palette in mixing areas with my main color. So got my yellow, and then I'm also going to get my main greens un mixed green, so Sap green and Verdian hue and just test those out and get ready for using them. First thing I'm going to try is just adding some yellow to Vraian hue, and let's see if that matches my main color. It's pretty close, but not quite. So now I'm going to try adjusting that by adding a little bit more Verdian hue. Now I'm going to try to mix a yellow green that matches the more yellow green parts of this plant. And that's pretty easy. So I'm going to see if I can get a little bit of a leaf painting that shows how the color varies from one area to another, and this is a variegated leaf, so there's also white spots. Was that as hard for you as it was for me? I feel like I didn't quite capture the color right, but I did learn a lot. In this lesson, we got practice matching greens from real life, and we got practice mixing lots of different greens using our palette. Era credit homework for this lesson is to take all of the greens in your palette and modify them by using grays, complimentary or closest complimentary colors and browns. And see how those turn out. 9. Mint Chocolate Chip is a Tint!: Do you know what the definition of the word tint is? Well, the true definition in color theory is a color that has white mixed into it, such as this. And that's what we're going to try to match right now is the mint chocolate chip color. Attes we use the word tint to talk about dark windshields and stuff like that on cars, but this is the color theory definition. Making a tint is sometimes necessary to achieve certain colors. It would be really hard for us to get this mint chocolate chip color without using a little bit of white wash. This is a controversial topic and some water colorists are very dogmatic about never using any white gouache with their water colors. That's because it affects the transparency and the saturation of those colors. There are purists who never use any gouache at all. We're going to use white gah because it can be really helpful when matching colors in nature. Certain succulents, lichen, tropical oceans, pink colors, purple colors, and turquoise colors in general are some of the colors that are really hard to match without making a tint using white gah. The danger of white is it's not the same as using the white from your paper. It tones down the saturation. It is also weak, so you have to be careful not to pollute it, but it can also pollute your other colors, so you don't want to get white mixed in with your other colors because it makes them less transparent and less saturated. So one of the things I like to do in my usual watercolor palette is I have an area just for mixing tints. That's my white gash right there. And you can see these are the two main colors that I mix, O turquoise colors and pink colors. So right now, we're going to dive in, and we're going to try to match this mint chocolate chip color. There's only one problem. The ice cream that I bought isn't actually mint chocolate chip color. Shoot. Maybe this other one that I bought will be. It has colors added to it. This one's barely green at all. But instead of just going out and buying more ice cream, and instead of just crying about it, I'm going to try to match the color of the lid instead. But first, I'm going to eat this mint chocolate chocolate. And that was good. But here's the color we're going to try to match, and it is a perfect tint. So let's try to match this mint chocolate chip color right now. The first thing I'm going to do is get a bunch of Vidian hue here all ready to go. As we know, that's already a sort of blue green. And in this case, I didn't clean the area completely first. That is more common with intermediate and advanced water colors to work with the colors that are already in your mixing areas. Now I'm going to add more blue. I'm going to use Seran blue, which is the main blue we've been using so far. And now that I've mixed those, it's a nice blue green. So let's swatch that out and see what that looks like. I think I want a little bit more blue in this color, so I'm going to get a little bit of that Serlian blue hue. Remember, one of the things we learned about this color is it's not that powerful compared to the Vidian. That looks more like what I'm shooting for, so let's swatch that out. Now that my brush is really clean, I'm going to get the white gah. So let's get a bunch of this on the brush and put it into one of the mixing areas, so we don't have to go back and forth into the white gah potentially polluting our precious white. So I just go back and forth from the pan of the color containing the gouache to the mixing area, and you can see squeezing the brush and getting out a lot of white ready to be used. Now that I have it there, I can just mix it in little by little. Sometimes it's best to mix the color into the white so that you don't weaken it as quickly. So let's swatch that out. And this is our first try, and it looks pretty good, but I think it has a little bit too much blue. It's a little bit too much of a blue green. Yep, a little bit too blue. So what we can do is we can take some of this. I already had some yellow green mixed from the previous lesson. I'm going to add a little bit of that here. I should also take notes, but see how I'm starting a new line with my swatches so that I'll know which one was which. Mixing it back into the original, a little bit less yellow green. And that's starting to look pretty close. So let's just make a few notes here about what we did. More yellow, more blue green, and that original was plus white guash, Seran blue hue and Vidian. And that was basically our kindergarten green mixture that we added white to. You can see that wasn't that difficult of a color to mix, but it wouldn't have been possible if we hadn't made it a tent. I think that color is a pretty close match. The only thing that is missing are the chocolate chips. In this lesson, we learned what is the definition of a tint. When tints are helpful, how to mix a tint to match a color in real life, and we also learned that color mixing gives you an excuse to eat ice cream. For your ex credit, find the complimentary color of this mint chocolate chip color that you just mixed. You may have to mix it yourself and then make a tint of that color and swatch it out. Hint, I might have already showed you what that color would be. 10. Yay! Conclusion: You did it. If you made it this far, you are the master of this palette, and you really deserve a reward for all your hard work. Some leftover ice cream, perhaps. It's been a journey through the world of color, and there's definitely been some ups and downs. We learned a lot in this class, such as the basics of color theory and the definition of terms such as complimentary colors, saturation, tint, and more. We also made close to 1,000 little squares of color and practice the ability of mixing and matching colors from real life. I can't wait to see your projects from this class. So be sure to upload them in the project resources section down below. Just scroll down below this video. You'll see it we'll say about projects and resources. Click on projects and resources because I can't wait to see how your pages turned out. No to continue on your learning journey. Do you want to paint landscapes or test your new skills on a virtual nature journaling adventure and check out my other classes on skill share. Do you want some final extra credit for this class? Review your palette and eliminate two of the colors that you didn't find useful and try replacing them with two new colors from the store that you think would give you better options. Once you do that, repeat all the exercises from this class? All the exercises from this class?