Colour Theory and Colour Mixing Basics: Say Goodbye to Muddy Mixes

1. About this Class: [MUSIC] Hey there, my name is Giovanni and I'm an artist and creative entrepreneur based in the sunny city of Chennai in the South of India. Gouache is my medium of choice and more importantly, I am an absolute geek when it comes to color mixing and color theory. I've been working with gouache for over three years now, and very early on in my journey, I realized that color mixing and understanding pigments and how they work with each other was going to form the foundation of all of my art exploration and everything that I was going to create. Tell me if this sounds like you. You try mixing a color that you've imagined in your head. It's this beautiful, vibrant, bold color that you've imagined. You take the colors necessary to mix it, and you try mixing it, and it ends up with this muddy mess and you just don't know how to fix it. Either you give up on art altogether or you give up on your medium altogether because you just get very discouraged because of your experience or you end up at the art supply store browsing racks and racks of all these different colors of paint, and you buy so many different colors because you're scared to mix your own. You end up with so many tubes of paint at home that lay unused at the end of the day. Trust me, I know what that feels like. That's something I do want you to ever have to go through. Color mixing can be such a joyful experience if you just know the basics and know what you're doing so that you can manipulate your pigments to get the desired results that you're hoping for. Whether you're a beginner, intermediate, or advanced artist, this class is suitable for every skill level because color is something we struggle with at every stage of our journey as an artist. I can assure you that this class has something for you to learn, and it's going to be very fun, and we're going to explore colors in a way that you haven't before. By the end of this class, you will get a deeper understanding of why pigments behave the way they do, why you get muddy mixes and how to prevent them, and also how you can start mixing up any color that you wish to. For now, just jump on over to the next lesson where I'll tell you a little bit more about your class project. [MUSIC] 2. Here's What You'll Create: [MUSIC] Like I told you in the last lesson, through the duration of this class, you're going to understand a lot of things about color. We're going to be looking at the color wheel and understanding it in depth. We're also going to understand what primary, secondary, and tertiary colors are and we'll take it one step further by understanding warm and cool primary colors as well. We'll understand how complimentary colors work together and how mixes using complimentary colors can create really surprising and interesting results that you may not have experienced before. At the end of this class, we'll bring all of that learning about color together into a final project where we'll work on a fun, fruity floral illustration, in which we'll explore color schemes to understand how different colors work together. This is going to be a space for exploration. I want you to feel free to create and paint anything that you feel like. I'm going to be equipping you with all of the basics so that you have an understanding of what choices you could make in your artwork to bring out the best results with the colors. Through the duration of this class, I'm going to be using gouache as my medium of choice, but you can feel free to apply everything that I teach you to any medium that you work with. You could apply it to watercolors, acrylics, acrylic gouache or even oil paints. However, I would suggest sticking with water-based media for now, that is watercolors, acrylics, and gouache, so that you're able to get quicker results and you don't have any drying time with the paint. But the concepts can apply to oil paints as well if that's what you choose to work with. Through the duration of this class, I urge you to keep sharing your progress and your final projects in the project gallery below. If you want to reach out to me anytime for questions, please feel free to drop them in the discussion box below. I am so passionate about color and I can't wait to start telling you all about it. Let's jump on over to the next lesson where I'll tell you about the materials that we're going need. 3. The Materials You'll Need: [MUSIC] So let's first discuss all the materials that you're going to be needing for today's class. Of course, all of these materials completely depend on which medium you are choosing to explore, like I mentioned before. The lessons in this class are completely applicable no matter what medium you choose to work with. So don't get too stressed about that. The most important thing that you need to understand is that whichever medium you're working with, you'll need to have a warm and cool tone of each of your primary colors. So the primary colors, when we look at the color wheel, are red, yellow, and blue. Those are the three colors I have here. But I have a warm shade and a cool shade of each of the primary colors. So for my cool shades, I have primary yellow, primary red, and primary blue. For my warm shades, I have permanent yellow deep, spectrum red, and ultramarine. Now I don't want you to get worried about the nomenclature here. Depending on what medium, what brand you're using, these colors can be named completely differently pr there can be other colors and pigments that fall into the categories of warm and cool primaries. I'm making a list in the description below of all the different colors that could fall under warm and cool primaries so that it's easy for you to pick them out for yourself depending on the medium that you're using. In one of the later lessons, we will be diving deeper into understanding how to identify warm and cool primaries and what difference they make to your color mixing. Aside from the warm and cool tones of each primary, which gives us these six colors, we just need a tube of black and a tube of white. Aside from that, I just have a generic palette here. I have my water bowls. I have Canson Montval cold press paper. So again, depending on the medium that you're working with, you can choose what papers you want to use. The important thing that we're going to be exploring in this class is color mixing. So I don't want you to worry about too many of the other details too much. Through the class, you'll see me using this palette here, which is my gouache palette, where I've already laid out all of my colors. So don't get confused by this. I will of course tell you what I'm using. But just so you know, the six colors here are my six primary colors. So it goes, cool, warm, cool, warm, cool, warm. So I'll be using this throughout the class. I may not be using these tubes. Finally, I just wanted to show you these color wheels, which are readily available in most art supply stores. They are a good thing to have on hand. We will of course be making our own color wheel during this class. But this is just something for you to keep that's handy and useful sometimes when you want to play with color mixing and you quickly want to understand color relationships. There's also a pocket version of it like this, which you can just carry around when you travel. So get your materials ready and I'll see you in the next lesson. [MUSIC] 4. What are Warm and Cool Primaries?: Before we move any further, let's start trying to understand what warm and cool primary colors are and how they can be identified. I've got some primary yellow here, which like I told you is a cool primary color. I'm just going to paint a swatch of it on my paper. [MUSIC] l then have permanent yellow deep, which is my warm primary. [MUSIC] You can already see that this color looks more sunny and vibrant, whereas this color looks more orangeish. Like you see on the color wheel here, if we flip it over, so this is yellow. We have red here and we have blue here. Typically, the color wheel is split across the center here. All of these colors, right from green to violet, including blue, are considered cool colors. All of these, from yellow to red, violet are considered warm colors. That's mostly because of the mood those colors bring. But we're going to understand that a little further now. We're going to understand how each of these three primary colors have warm and cool tones to them. Just stick with me for a bit. We're going to get deeper into understanding this even better. But just by looking at it, you can see that this has a lot more of this orangeish tone to it. Therefore, this is considered a warm like yellow. I'll show you more details on why this is considered a cool yellow as we get deeper into understanding the color wheels as well. For now, let's go ahead and paint out the other four colors. This is primary red, which again, is a cool red. By the way, if you're curious about gouache as a medium, and if you want to work with gouache for this class and you want to understand how gouache works a little better, you can check out my gouache one-on-one class, which will give you all the details on working with gouache. Now we have spectrum red. [MUSIC] The next is primary blue, which is a cool blue. [MUSIC] Finally, ultramarine, which is our warm blue. [MUSIC] The next thing I'll do is add a little bit of white to each of these shades because somehow that helps you see the undertones of the color better. [MUSIC] If you're working with a medium like watercolor, then you don't need to add white to it. That's not typically done with watercolor. But instead, you could just lighten the color by adding more water and making it more transparent. [MUSIC] Sometimes to unseasoned, adding white to the color helps you see the undertones a lot better. You can already see see this color looks a lot more orange than this one does, which gives you a hint that this is probably a warmer shade. This one looks more peachy, whereas this one looks a little more pinkish. That's an indication that this is a cool red. Here again, we can see that this blue does look cooler than this one does, whereas this looks like it could be leaning more towards violet. That's classified as a warm blue, whereas this is a cool blue. I understand completely that this is a little hard to grasp as a beginner, but what we're going to do next is we're going to create two color wheels, which will help you understand that a little better. Let's jump straight into that. 5. Creating Simple Colour Wheels: [MUSIC] We're going to create two simple color wheels. The color wheel that we're going to create is only going to incorporate the three primary colors and the three secondary colors. Yellow and red combines to form orange, which is a secondary color. Yellow and blue combines to from green, which is a secondary color, and red and blue combines to form violet, which is your third secondary color. We're going to do that, but with two different sets of primaries. We'll first create a simple color wheel here using the three primaries on the left and then we'll create a second color wheel here, which incorporates the three warm primaries. Once we're done with that, we'll observe the differences and try to understand warm and cool primaries a little better. Let's get started. [MUSIC] When you're mixing your secondary colors, an important thing to keep in mind is that the secondary color should not look like it's leaning more towards one of the primaries than the other. What I mean by that is when you see this green, the green should not look more yellow or more blue. It should look like a perfect 50 percent and sometimes that's not done by mixing 50 percent of the two pigments because sometimes in paints, one pigment could be stronger than the other. But when you're mixing it up, you want it to look visually like it's 50 percent of these two pigments. Make sure you do your mix accordingly. When I mixed up this violet, I used almost equal quantities of the red and blue, but I'm finding that it looks a lot more reddish than it looks bluish. I think I would need to add a bit more blue to that to make it a 50 percent mix. This looks a lot better, but now it's a little bit bluish compared to reddish. Again, balancing that out. [MUSIC] That's our first color wheel done. Let's now go ahead and do the second color wheel, which we'll be using these three primaries instead of these three. That is our warm primaries. [MUSIC] If you're working with gouache, then sometimes you'll find that when you mix darker colors like the violet, for example, if you're using it in its thick consistency, which is how you're normally supposed to use gouache, then it might be a little hard to exactly identify the colors and its undertones. In the case of color mixing, I would recommend just adding a little bit more water so that you're able to see the color more clearly. [MUSIC] Now that we have our two color wheels, now comes the fun part. I want you to pause this video for a second and note down a few observations that you have between the two color wheels that you've created. What are you noticing? What stands out? What's the difference between the secondary colors and why do you think it's happening? Pause the video and once you're done noting down your own observations, let's discuss them. I hope you have your observations down. Now, let's talk about the two color wheels. The first thing I'm noticing is that this green looks a lot more earthy and muddy compared to this green which looks bright and vibrant. This violet looks a lot more bright and vibrant, whereas this one doesn't look like violet at all. It's not the violet we want to mix up when we want to mix violet and we want it to be bright, and it looks a lot more muddy again. The oranges look similar, but I still can tell that this orange looks a little more pale when compared to this one, which does have a bit more pigmentation and brightness to it. Like I said, this was our cool color wheel and this was our warm color wheel. Before we really start to understand why these differences are happening between the secondary colors that we're mixing, we need to understand complimentary colors and what they mean when it comes to the context of color mixing. Head on over to the next lesson and let's talk about it. [MUSIC] 6. What Happens When You Mix Primaries?: Before we dive deeper into understanding complementary colors and how they mix with each other, let's first talk about primary colors. What are primary colors really? Primary colors are any color that cannot be mixed using any other color. These are the three basic colors as they exist in nature, yellow, red, and blue. You get multiple different shades of primary color, which is what we discussed in the previous lesson. But essentially, this is what it comes down to. They cannot be mixed using any other colors. Secondary colors are those that can be mixed using the two primary colors. You have three secondary colors. Finally, you have tertiary colors. Tertiary colors are what come in-between here. If you'd like to, you can mix up your tertiary colors as well. When you mix a primary color with a secondary color, you get a tertiary color. In this case, here we would have yellow-green. Over here, we would have blue-green. That's what you can see in this larger color wheel here as well. We have yellow, green, which is primary and secondary, and between them comes yellow-green. Between green and blue comes blue-green. It's named by the primary, followed by the secondary color. Let's do a quick activity to understand what happens when we mix the three primary colors together. I'm going to do it for both of these color wheels and place it right in the middle of the wheel. Let's try to take visually equal quantities of the three cool primaries first and mix them together. Again, remember what I told you in the previous lesson when we were mixing secondary colors? When I say visually equal, they don't necessarily have to be equal quantities of the pigment themselves. But when you mix up the color, you shouldn't be able to particularly distinguish one primary color from the others. They should all look to be in equal proportions. With gouache, I particularly find that red is a really strong pigment that tends to dominate the other pigments. I always start off by mixing a lot less red than I do with the other colors. Once I mix it, if I need to adjust, then I do that. Let's mix it and see what happens. The color I've mixed looks very green, as you can see. I can tell that there's not enough red because if it looks green, it means that there's more yellow and blue. Because yellow and blue is what forms green. I can tell that there's not enough red pigment in this, so I'm going to go ahead and add a bit more. Now, it looks a lot more red. Again, I'm just adding the primaries. Adjusting it so that it doesn't look particularly more towards one color than the others. Once you make the mix, you'll find that you end up with something like this. That's an almost deep gray or brownish color, which is what happens when you mix the three primary colors together. Let's lay that out in the center of our color wheel. Now, we'll do the same for these three primaries as well. That is our warm primaries. Again, I've ended up with the color which I can tell when I move the painted side, that it looks a lot more red than it does the other colors. I'm just going to add a bit more blue to that. Try to balance it out. Again, you'll end up with this very brownish color. We lay that out in the center of this color wheel. What we're observing here is a basic law of color that states that when you mix the three primary colors together, all the color cancels each other out. In nature, typically the three primary colors should technically lead to pure jet black. But when it comes to pigments, it's not so straightforward because no pigment is 100 percent pure primary as it exists in nature and in light. Because of that, we do see a bit of color which can look grayish or dirty brown or muddy green. But essentially, what happens is that the three primary colors cancel out the color in each other, giving us this really dark neutral that's almost black. Now, let's dive into the next lesson where we'll understand complementary colors and why this is important. 7. Why Am I Mixing Mud??: [MUSIC] Understanding complementary colors and how they mix with each other was something that was completely game-changing for my color mixing journey, and you're going to see why. Firstly, to put it very simply, complementary colors are colors opposite to each other on the color wheel. That is yellow and purple or violet, which are complementary colors, orange and blue, red and green. The same works even when you go into tertiary colors. Let's pick any tertiary color here. Let's take blue-green as an example. The color exactly opposite to it is red-orange. Blue-green and red-orange are complementary colors. What does that mean? When you mix complementary colors together again, it essentially means that you are mixing the three primary colors together. Like we discussed in the previous lesson, when you mix yellow with violet, what you're essentially doing is mixing yellow with a combination of red and blue, which forms violet. You're mixing three primary colors together and canceling out the color in each other, which results in this deep dark neutral color in the center of the color wheel. Just to demonstrate, let's quickly make a swatch where you can mix any red with any green to see what happens. I'm just taking some Spectrum Red here from my palette and I'm using this green that I already have, which is Permanent Green Middle. You can use any green that you already have on your palette. [MUSIC] I'm mixing the two colors together and I'm going to swatch it on my paper here. You can immediately see that it's this really dark, almost black color. It's a bit more green in my case because I used more green than I used red. But as you change the proportions of that, you're essentially seeing that they are canceling the color out in each other and it's taking you very close to this color in the center. By understanding this simple thing, you can start mixing colors that you want to mix rather than being at the mercy of how your pigments seem to be behaving. You try to mix a color but then it ends up looking muddy. What if you could use this understanding to recognize why colors mix in a muddy way and how you could prevent that, and also how you could intentionally mix more deep all the colors which could be of benefit to your art? I told you we would tie all of this together and start understanding why we saw the differences in the secondary colors because of understanding how complementary colors mix together. Now, let's take a look at these two greens and understand why the difference happened. Like I told you, this is a cool yellow and this is a warm yellow. This is a cool blue and this is a warm blue. A warm blue tends to have a bit of a bias towards mixing violet, which means that a warm blue has some amount of redness to it. This might be hard for you to see at the moment but as you practice with color more, you'll start learning to identify the biases of colors. It will come with practice. But what you need to understand right now is that a warm blue has a bias towards mixing violet, which means it has a bit of a red undertone to it. Whereas a warm yellow has a bias towards mixing orange, which we noticed when we mixed the color with white itself. We could see a little bit of orange undertones to the color, which means that this also has a bit of redness to it. As we know and have understood from the complementary colors and how they mix together, red is a complementary color of green. When you mix these two colors together, you aren't mixing a pure yellow and a pure blue together, rather you are mixing both of them, which have a slight reddish undertone to them. Which means you are bringing red into your green mix, which gives you a much more oddy and muted looking green as compared to this green on our color wheel on the left where the green is more bright and vibrant. If you take this situation, you will have a cool yellow, which has a bias towards green. The cool blue also has a bias towards green. When you mix these two colors together, you're getting this vibrant and very pure looking green as compared to this oddy and neutral looking green on the right. Let's understand this from orange as well. It's again the same thing that's happening. A cool red has a bias towards violet and the cool yellow, as I mentioned, has a bias towards green. When we mix this orange, both of these colors are bringing an undertone of blue into the color, which makes the orange not as bright and vibrant. It looks more pale as compared to this orange, which is so much more vibrant. In this case, the warm red has a bias towards orange and so does the warm yellow. Both of these colors bring in the same bias and mix a bright and vibrant orange, which we also saw happening in the case of green. Now in the case of violet, it's a little different. As you can see, this warm blue has a bias towards violet, and this cool red has a bias towards violet. Actually, neither of these mixes are the most vibrant violet. Let's try mixing one more shade of violet which uses both of these colors. That is primary red, which is my cool red and ultramarine, which is my warm blue. [MUSIC] You can see on the palette itself how you're getting this beautiful, bright eggplant violet in this case. Here we have a violet which is made using these two colors, both of which have a bias towards mixing violet. You can see that it's so much more bright and vibrant than both of these mixes, even though this color on the left is not too bad either, the one on the right definitely looks muddy. The one on the left is possible but you can immediately see the difference. This one is so much more vibrant. When you want to combine these two wheels together to have a good reference, it's useful to create what's called a split primary color wheel which I'm displaying on the screen right now. Sometimes artists create that or print one out to have a reference because it becomes easier to know which colors to mix when you want to have the most vibrant secondary colors. I hope this has helped you understand complementary colors a little bit better and understand why they mix with each other the way that they do. If you have questions about any of this, please drop them in the discussion box below and I'll be happy to help you out. In the next lesson, we're going to understand the three axes that each and every color that we see exists on. Let's dive into that because it will really help you understand how to identify colors that you see in your environment around you and how to start mixing them. [MUSIC] 8. Fun Colour Jargon : Hue, Value and Chroma: [MUSIC] Now that we know the basics of the color wheel; primary colors, secondary colors, and how complimentary colors mix with each other, let's start understanding how to identify any color that we see around us. For example, let's just take a look at this cloth that I have here. While I do know that this cloth is blue, I can't exactly say that it's this blue or it's this blue. There's definitely something more than that that's happening. Every color around us exists on three different axis. One useful framework to understand this is the Munsell color system. You can see it on your screen right now, and I don't want to confuse you too much by getting too technical about it. But every color can be understood in terms of three different variables. The first one is the hue. The hue is basically where the color exists in the color wheel. For example, I can tell you that this exists as a blue. Maybe it has a tinge of green in it, I would say it's a bit blue-green, not pure blue, but it exists somewhere around here. That is the hue of the color. The hue is the color as it exists in the color wheel, which could be a primary, secondary, or a tertiary color. The next is the value of the color. By value we simply mean the lightness or the darkness of the color. Let's do a simple activity to see different values of a specific color. You can pick any color that you have. I'm going to use a bit of spectrum red for this. First, let's paint the color in its completely pure hue in the center here. We're now going to create different values of this color. We create lighter values by adding white to the color and we create darker values by adding black to the color. Let's gradually start adding some white to it first. The next thing we'll do is similarly to this. We will start adding black to the color and place it on the right here. [MUSIC] Try not to make very sudden jumps in the color when you're doing this so that you're able to see the complete range of colors that are possible just by changing the quantity of black or white. Finally, we'll end up with an almost black shade of red. These are the different values of the color, which is exactly what you see in the center of the Munsell color system. This tells you that each hue can have a lightness or darkness associated with it, which is called its value. Now coming back to this piece of cloth that we were talking about, like we discussed, it's definitely a shade of blue and it has a lighter value. We would mix it by adding some white to the blue. The next thing we'll understand is chroma or saturation. Chroma or saturation basically means the brightness or dullness of a particular hue. Now that's not the same as adding white or adding black to a color, which is something that's very important to understand. Rather, the chroma of the color changes. Like we saw here, we add the complementary color to it. The colors as they exist in the color wheel are the brightest they can possibly get. That is they're at their highest intensity of color. Now the only thing that's possible is that we could dull this out. We could dull out or desaturate the color by adding its complementary color to it. We'll take red again as an example because that's what we did here as well. Let's take some red. Let's take some green. If you already have some green in your tubes of paint, you can use that, if not, feel free to mix up a green using just blue and yellow. Now let's try to desaturate this red. Like how we gradually added white and black, I'm going to gradually add green to the color. Let's see what starts happening. [MUSIC] Now we're starting to approach green. We've completely desaturated the red up until this point. You can see a clear difference between what's happening here and what's happening here. This is becoming more brownish and there's still a lot of interest to the color as compared to adding black, which makes it very dull and tones down the color in a way that isn't really as appealing. Of course, there are a lot of applications to this as well, but most artists who work professionally choose to dull out their colors using the compliment instead of using black because black adds dullness or lifelessness to your color, which doesn't happen when you add the complement instead. The complement instead adds interest to the color and keeps it still very deep and complex as a color without completely dulling it out. Now I hope this helps you understand what the hue is, what the value is, and what the saturation or chroma of a color is. Next, let's do a simple activity to try to mix a color by understanding its three variables. 9. Activity : Mixing Colours From Life: [MUSIC] I've got this object in front of me, which is this onion. Now we're going to try to mix up a similar color to this, which will give you an idea of how to start identifying colors you see around you and mixing similar colors. Firstly, we need to identify the hue of this color. I can definitely say that this one fall somewhere as a red violet. It's definitely more red than it is violet. But it's not a pure red, so I would place it somewhere here, which is between a red and this red violet. The first thing I'll do is try to mix up a red violet and then we'll start adjusting the value and the saturation to come closer to the color on this onion. When I'm picking which primary colors I want to use for this, I'm looking at the undertones of the color. I can tell that it's not a very bright violet, so I don't think I'll be mixing two colors which makes a bright violet. I would rather mix a warm red because I do see slightly a orange undertones to the color, so I would pick a warm red to start off with. I'm using my spectrum red that I have here. For my blue, I'm going to use the primary blue. Like I said, I feel it's a lot more red than it is violet, so I'm mixing very little blue into my red. [MUSIC] I feel this is getting a little more muddy than I would like, so instead of the primary blue, I'm going to use my warm blue, which is ultramarine. [MUSIC] Getting some of the color off my brush and mixing the rest into this red. We can see that we've mixed up a purple that's not as dull as the first one. But at the same time, it's not too vibrant either. I'm keeping the color a little watery so that you're able to see the color well. My first thought is that I would probably want it to be a little more red. [MUSIC] I am taking some more red and adding that in. [MUSIC] I do think this looks a lot closer as a base hue, to begin with. Now as we learned, we can adjust the saturation and the value of this color to try to come closer to what we're after. The first thing I'll do is take out some white on my palette. [MUSIC] I'll mix a touch of white into this color. Make sure you do this very gradually because you don't want to suddenly alter the color too much, and I'll mix that in here. Do you see how it's coming so much closer to the color we have on the onion? [MUSIC] I really like this and I definitely think this would be one of the tones that I would use on it. [MUSIC] But at the same time, I am feeling that it's probably a bit more orange-ish than how this seems, so I'm just adding a touch of a warm yellow into it. [MUSIC] I'll add a bit more white to create a lighter hue. [MUSIC] Color mixing is a journey of learning to see your colors and adjusting them as you go. [MUSIC] This is so much closer. I really like this color. When I place my brush in front of the onion, I can see how close it looks to the actual color on it. Of course there are variations and in any object or point to have. Especially if they are natural objects, they're going to be so many variations of col on it and as you go, you can see that I can definitely use all of these colors. Like this could be my shadows or the darker spots that you see here on the onion, and I can vary all of these. When I want to add highlights, I can add in a lot more white and use that to add highlights and it will look great. You just need to stop seeing colors as hues and values and saturation, and you'll be able to mix up any color that you're seeing in front of you. In the next lesson, we'll learn how to create mixing charts. I'll see you there. 10. See The Potential Of Your Colours: When I started my color mixing journey, I quickly realized the importance of creating mixing charts. Mixing charts are charts like this, where you try to understand the relationships between the different colors that you own and what the possibilities with them are. I personally own 13 different shades of gouache and I use them to create these mixing charts. It was pretty unbelievable the number of colors and the number of possibilities that I was able to see with just these 13 tubes of gouache that I own. This is completely possible for you as well and they create references to keep with you because not only do they help you know what colors to mix when you are trying to accomplish something but also they can inform you on what colors you need to invest in. For example, if you see that you're able to mix this tone of green using Cyprus green and permanent yellow deep, then you know that you don't need to buy a sap green or a grassy green because you can very easily mix it with pigments that you already own. Having all of these references becomes very useful in making those choices very intentionally in your journey. Let's try to understand how to create mixing charts like this. Pick any two colors that you own. They don't have to be the primary colors, pick anything. Let's try to create one mixing chart. For this demo, I'm going to use my ultramarine and I'll use Naples yellow deep, which is almost ocher yellow. Take your two colors out in individual wells on your palette. Make sure you don't mix them together. Start by laying out the two colors in their pure form on two ends of your paper. [MUSIC] After this, just like how we did the exercise in values where we mixed white or black gradually into our color, this time we're going to make one of our colors gradually into the other. I'm going to start from this end. I'll first take a little bit of my Naples yellow deep. Make sure you're being very gradual and I'll mix that into my ultramarine. [MUSIC] If you feel like you've made too bigger jump, then add a bit of the original color back into it. Now, I'll continue gradually adding Naples yellow deep into this. [MUSIC] That's how simple it is to create a mixing chart like this. I would urge you to use every drip of paint you have and create detailed mixing charts where you're able to see how every color interacts with every other color. If you don't have the time to do that, at least do it with a few key pigments which you like using so that you can understand their relationships with each other. For example, if I wanted to mix a nice, swampy, marshy green or oka color, I would never have thought to mix these two colors if I had not created this mixing chart. It even creates such an interesting blue-green which I can see myself using in certain applications. Creating charts like this really opens your mind to the possibilities of what you can do with your pigments that you already own without having to buy any new tubes of paint. In the next lesson, let's learn how we can make some neutral colors. We've talked all about these bright and beautiful vibrant colors. But what if you want it to mix this shade of beige or grayish color, how would you go about doing that? Let's discuss it in the next lesson. 11. Activity : How to Easily Mix Neutrals?: Once you've understood the relationships between your primary and secondary colors, it becomes very easy for you to start mixing neutrals. Let's just go back to what we initially discussed, which is that the three-primary colors mixed together gives you this really almost black, neutral color. We'll stop there. Let's see how we're able to manipulate that to create different neutrals. I'm just going to take some primary red, some primary blue, and some primary yellow. Let's start by just mixing them together. [MUSIC] I'm also going to keep some white on my palette here. You can see that this mix has a lot more red than the other two primary colors. But let's just leave it at that for now. I'm just going to keep swatching the different colors that I mix. I'd urge you to do this activity along with me so that you're able to understand how to mix different neutral colors with your paints as well. Now I've just added some white to change the value of this color. Just by doing this, a mix of the three primaries with a little extra red, you can see that we've actually developed a color that's a very neutral skin dawn color. This can now be manipulated by adding the different primaries in different ratios to see what happens. I'm going to add a bit more yellow to this. It's starting to develop a really nice peachy skin tone. If you want to make even lighter skin tones, you can take a lot more white. [MUSIC] Keep playing with their primary colors to see what can happen with them. You'll realize that you'll be shocked with the number of colors you are able to mix with just your primary colors, especially in neutral. None of us ever think to use our primary colors to mix neutrals like these. A lot of us end up buying colors like flesh tint, which we don't really mean. I'm painting this very light by the way, because gouache will always dry a little darker than how it looks when it's wet. I'm going to let that dry so we can see how it looks. Now I'm going to start adding a little bit of blue. We are able to see some really interesting skin tones and the more you play with it, you'll see that there's a million different skin tones that you could mix with it. [MUSIC] When I add a bit of blue to this, you can see that the moment I did that, it grayed out the color. I find that by mixing the three primary colors with a little extra blue, I get some really interesting shades of green. [MUSIC] I'm just going to keep playing with these to see all the different colors that I come up with. [MUSIC] By adding a bit more blue and yellow to this, you can see that I've got a very greenish gray. I love doing this exercise and also mixing my colors this way when I'm painting because I just end up with such complex colors in my painting, rather than just taking some white and black to mix gray, which is what we would normally do. I've realized that just by manipulating the three primary colors or even any other colors that you want once you understand how to do this, it becomes so easy to create interesting and much more realistic looking colors in your paintings. Because no color in nature just exists as black and white. There's always a lot more complexity to it based on how the light is bouncing off of it and all those factors. [MUSIC] You can see here how the mix of the three primaries look so different when it's more red heavy, it's more blue heavy and it's more yellow heavy. [MUSIC] I can go on and on like this but mainly what I wanted to show you is that the range of neutrals and all the colors that you can create just by using your three primary colors and some white is completely endless. Feel free to play with that and explore your colors. You'll be mind-blowing with what's possible for you. In the next lesson, we're going to do a small intuitive color mixing exercise, which is going to be a lot of fun. I'll see you there. 12. Activity : Intuitive Colour Mixing: For this exercise, get out a fresh piece of paper or your sketchbook, and let's start creating some colors. Pick out any three primary colors that you want to work with. They could be warm or cool. It's completely up to you. Decide a theme and start mixing colors that work with that theme. I'm going to try doing a vintage floral-inspired theme. That would be a lot of pastels and neutrals and a lot more desaturated colors so that you get that vintage feel. I'm going to start with three primary colors for this exercise. I'm going to be using my permanent yellow deep along with spectrum red. [MUSIC] I'm going to use primary blue with it. [MUSIC] The yellow and the red are both warm, but the blue I've chosen to work with is a cool blue. I'm doing that so that there's a bit of clash in the colors because I do want them to desaturate each other a bit so that I get that vintage feel. But if the theme you've chosen is something like nautical, or say a bright forest scene as your theme, then I would say pick colors that work well together to create really bright and vibrant hues, if that's what you're going for. Pick your primaries and we're only going to use primary colors and white. If you'd like, you could use some black as well just to see what happens, but I'm going to just use white. [MUSIC] The first thing I started doing because like I said, it is a vintage floral-inspired color palette, so I'm just mixing an orange. I'll start by making it very light and pastel. Just by itself, I do find that it's very bright. It's not giving me that vintage feel. I'm going to add the complementary color of orange, which is blue into this. It immediately desaturates it and makes it look a lot more vintage. [MUSIC] There's no perfection here. We're not aiming for any perfection. I just want you to play and have fun with your colors and see what you come up with. Just keep adding the different colors in different ratios. See how we are mixing them, how you'd like to adjust them. Just learn to see colors and see what's happening with them. [MUSIC] Any color that you find interesting for the theme that you're working on can go down into your sheet of paper. [MUSIC] You see how when I mixed this secondary color using the cool blue with the warm red, because they are clashing in terms of the biases, I didn't even need to mix the complimentary color in to make it dull. It was automatically a lot more dull than it was vibrant. It's a lot more desaturated just because of the primary colors that I worked with. [MUSIC] I get this very nice grayed out, violet. [MUSIC] I want you to just go by feel not overthink any of this. Just mix colors that make you happy that you think work with your theme well. [MUSIC] I love this periwinkle color that I've been able to mix. In this case, I used a lot more blue than the red. In this case, it was equal, but here there's more blue and it's become this beautiful periwinkle color. [MUSIC] Even when I'm trying to mix up a deep green here for my vintage floral theme, I'm trying to use it in a way that's more desaturated so that it still fits in with my entire vibe of my palette. [MUSIC] You see how I get this lovely deep green? That's definitely desaturated, but it's still not lightened in value. I've tried to keep it at its original hue itself. [MUSIC] Similarly, if I'm doing florals, I may need some slightly more brownish tones so I'm trying to mix up that as well. [MUSIC] While this is a really nice brown that works with the palette, I find it a little strong compared to my other colors so I would want to mix up much more lightened in terms of value color, which can be used for my browns, and maybe I would use something like this just for accents or for highlights. [MUSIC] This is a really nice gray that I could use. [MUSIC] Finally, now that I have a nice pallet of neutrals and green, I'm just going to try to mix a few more floral tones. [MUSIC] There we have a beautiful vintage botanical or floral-inspired set of colors which are ready to be used in a lovely composition. I hope you had fun with your own color mixing and be sure to share it in the project gallery so that I can see it and provide my feedback. In the next lesson, we're going to start working on our class project where we'll explore color harmony and how to use it in a composition. I'll see you there. 13. Colour Schemes and Harmony: A quick note on color schemes and color harmony before we dive into our final project. Let's pick up the color wheel right here. Having a color wheel like this can really help you when you want to decide what colors to put into your composition. There are so many different ways to bring harmony into your composition, but for today, let's just discuss the most common ones. First, of course, is the complementary color scheme, which we discussed earlier as well. Any two colors opposite each other on the color wheel can be paired as complimentaries and they'll bring the highest level of contrast into your paintings. So we did discuss the standard complimentary sets, which is one primary with one secondary. That would be yellow with violet, orange with blue, and red with green. But you can also do it with your tertiary colors, which would be yellow-green with red-violet, for example. Now secondly, we have an analogous color scheme, which is any three or four colors that lie beside each other on the color wheel. That is, they are adjacent to each other. So for example, if we were to use yellow, yellow-green, green, and blue-green, that would create a very interesting palette as well, where they're all very similar to each other. That would create a very subtle look to your color composition as opposed to something like a complimentary pairing where you're bringing in a lot of contrast to the piece. Now you also have a split complementary color scheme, which is almost exactly like using a complimentary, but instead of using the color exactly opposite, you're going to go one step to the left and one step to the right and use these three colors. So that would be yellow with red-violet, and blue-violet, instead of just directly using yellow with violet. So you can see that here. Any of these would be split complimentary sets. The next is a triadic set where you're forming three colors that lie in a triangle equidistant from each other on the color wheel. So in this example, let's take yellow again and yellow, red, and blue, which are of course the three primary colors from a triadic color scheme. We could also do that with tertiaries. So we have yellow-orange, red-violet, and blue-green falling into a perfect draft. The next is a tetradic color scheme where you're forming a rectangle on the color wheel. We have red-orange, red-violet, blue-green, and yellow-green that form a tetradic color scheme. Again, you can always move this and use any other colors which fall into a rectangle. There are a lot of online tools that can help you come up with perfectly balanced color compositions which you can use as inspiration for your work. You can also find a lot of inspiration from Pinterest and just start to notice color patterns around you because you will start seeing that most of the paintings that you like fall into one of these kinds of color schemes. When we talk about using three colors, we're not always talking about using them in their pure hue as they are here in the color wheel. You can always change the shade of the color. You can change the value and the saturation of the color like we discussed in previous exercises and it would still work in that color scheme. When you're creating a composition, it's good to have a good mix of different values of the colors that you're using so that it all doesn't look very monotonous. For today's composition, we're going to keep it really simple and we're going to work with a simple complimentary color scheme. Let's dive into the next lesson and start painting. 14. Final Project : Composition: I'm going to start by sketching a simple composition. I'm going to be doing some oranges and leaves, which you can see in the project gallery below as a reference. If you'd like, you can do the same composition as me, if not, feel free to create any composition of your own. It can also be abstract. The point is we want to explore color schemes and we want to see how different values of colors can work together and different saturations and all of that. You can do that with absolutely any composition. I'm just going to start sketching mine right now. [MUSIC] Now that I've positioned all the basic shapes that I want in my composition, I'm just refining some of the lines and then I'll go ahead and lightly erase all of the lines so that it's just barely visible and I don't want the lines interfering with my painting. 15. Final Project : Mixing Your Colours: [MUSIC] The composition is ready and now comes the fun part of mixing up colors. In this I'm going to stick to just three tones of colors and it's going to be complimentary color scheme. I'm choosing red, orange, and blue-green as my complimentary pairing. The oranges are going to be orange, but I'm going to make it slightly more reddish so that I'm able to do this complimentary pairing because I really like that pairing and I'm going to do not make my leaves in a typical green, but it's going to be a lot more bluish. Then I will pair a background color with it that I think works with the entire composition. Let's start mixing the colors. Just like in all the previous exercises, I'm using my Winsor & Newton Designers' Gouache here. I've got Canson Montval wallpaper, I have my palette, I have my water capsule. For this I'm going to be using the Princeton Heritage round brush in size 4. I'm taking my warm red onto the palette, which is spectrum red. Like we discussed in the previous exercises, spectrum red is a warmer red, so it forms really nice oranges. Along with that, I'm taking permanent yellow deep, which again is my warm yellow because the two of them mix really nicely to form lovely oranges. I'm keeping this here, I've kept them separate for now. They've got some white here. I'm going to start mixing my base orange color. I'm taking some of the red and mixing it in. It's a good idea to have a scrap piece of paper next to you so you can just watch your colors to make sure they're exactly what you want before you move forward. Once you've mixed one color, when you're mixing your next colors, you can just lay them out here and see if they're looking harmonious like how you want them to. Like I said, I want it to be more of a red orange than just pure orange, so I'm just adding a bit more red into that. This definitely looks a lot more reddish than the previous one I mixed up, so I'm happy with that. I'll keep that as my base orange color and I'll start mixing up my blue-green. For my blue-green, I'm taking ultramarine, which is my warm blue. If you refer back to our color wheel which we created earlier, you'll see that the warm blue, when mixed with the warm yellow, creates a very muddy green, and that's not what I'm after today. But the cool blue with the cool yellow creates a very bright and vibrant green, which is also not what I'm after. I want something in-between these two. What I'm doing now is I'm taking my warm blue and mixing with a cool yellow instead. It will be something that is definitely more muted than this, but it's not going to be as dull and washed out as this one. It will be brighter than this. Please ignore these swatches here. I messed up the color a bit before I recorded this video. I'm taking my cool yellow to mix into that. I'm going to place it here and just take a bit. Perfect. Do you see how the green that that mix is definitely? This is blue-green, so it's a lot more blue. Keep that in mind. But as a color, it is a lot more vibrant than this mix and it's still not as vibrant as this mix, which is exactly what I was trying to achieve. I'm going to make it just a tad more green, so I'm adding a bit more yellow into that. I'm happy with that, but I think I'll need a bit more color to paint all of these leaves, so I'll just mix a bit more into that. Great. The final thing I'll do is just add a bit of white into that because I want to change the value of the color a little. Great. I'm happy with that. You can already see that these two colors are really contrasting each other, which is exactly what I want for this composition, and also you can see that the pure hue of this red-orange is still so much lighter in value than the tone down or lightened value of this blue-green. Every color as it exists in its pure hue is of a different value, and then you can further alter that value like we discussed earlier by adding white or black to it. Now I've already taken my remaining white into this value here, what I'm trying to do is now mix up a background color, which is similar to this blue-green, but much, much lighter in value. I've taken a lot of white into this value and I've got my ultramarine here and I'm just mixing up a very similar color to this, but of a much lighter value. This is the value I want, but I'm finding it more green than its blue-green, so I'm adding just a touch more of the ultramarine into it to make it more bluish. I really like the hue, but I'm finding that it is still a lot darker than what I wanted in value, so I need to add a bit more white to balance that. Perfect. I'm quite happy with that. It gives me a good variation of value from these two colors. This is nicely light and so it's much lighter in value than this orange here too, and it's still staying in tune with the entire color scheme. It's perfect. We have these three base colors now mixed up here. We will create a few variations of them as we lay out on this painting just to create some shadows and highlights. We'll discuss that once we finish painting the base colors in. For now, let's just dive into painting this. [MUSIC] 16. Final Project : Let's Paint!: I'm going to start by painting in all of these oranges. Now, if you want, you could start painting the background first, if you feel that's a little easier. But I'm going to start by painting my subject. Then I'll paint the background. The reason I do that is that it helps the subject stand out a little better than if you were to do it the other way around. I'm just taking my red orange. I'll start filling in these oranges. [MUSIC] Just to create a bit of variation between these two tones here, I'm going to add a bit more red here [MUSIC] to indicate that this orange is behind that one. [MUSIC] Now, before I come in and start creating any shading on these, I'm going to do my leaves. [MUSIC] Now that this is dry, I'm going to fill this background rectangle that I've drawn out with this lighter value of the blue-green that I've mixed here. [MUSIC] Now that the background is painted in, I'm going to do a few touch-ups where I overlapped the background on the stem. I'll start with that. Then we'll create some different values of the colors we've mixed to do some shading. [MUSIC] Now to do the shading, we're going to incorporate not just the value changes that we discussed in the previous exercises, but also we're going to incorporate a few saturation changes to create deeper hues of the colors. Let's start with the orange. [MUSIC] I'm going to take some white on my palette. Now to start off with, I'll just create a much lighter color of the orange [MUSIC] just by adding white to the base color. I've decided that my shadows are going to fall on the left, and my highlights are going to come on the right. I'll add some brighter or lighter values of the orange on the right. [MUSIC] You can even blend this color into your base layer. But for this, I'm just layering it over the color. [MUSIC] To create the first layer of shadows, I'm going to take some of the red orange and add a bit more of the red into it. [MUSIC] Finally, just to add a little extra depth to them and to make it look more natural, I don't just want to create a darker version, but also a more desaturated version of the orange. The final thing I'm going to do is add a bit of the complementary color. As we discussed in the complementary mixing exercise, I'm going to mix a bit of this complementary color that we have mixed here into the orange. Now you see, it creates this tan, brownish color because it immediately desaturates the orange. I'm going to use this very minimally just to create a few extra bits of shadow for depth. [MUSIC] Great, our oranges are done. Now, similar to that, I'm going to create a lighter version of the blue-green for adding a bit of highlights to the leaves. [MUSIC] Finally, I'm going to use a similar complementary mix like we did for the oranges, but with a lot more blue-green to create a lot more depth in my leaves. [MUSIC] Make sure you use this very minimally because the contrast is really strong. [MUSIC] Finally, you can allow that to dry. Erase any of your extra pencil lines on the outside and you're done. There we have it, our final project is complete. I hope you enjoyed painting this. I hope it give you an understanding of how you can incorporate complementary color schemes. Not just vary your values, but also your saturation, to really bring a lot of depth and interest into your painting. It was so much fun painting this with you. I hope you will upload your projects into the project gallery because I'd love to see them. For now, let's go ahead and recap everything that we learned in this class. [MUSIC] 17. A Quick Recap: Congratulations. You made it to the end of this class. I hope your head is swimming with different ideas of colors that you're going to create after this class. Just to recap everything that we learned during this class, we learned about the color, we learned how it works. We also learned how the color wheel changes when we just change our primary shapes that we're working with. We then understood what biases are, what warm and cool primaries are and how to identify them. We learned how you could mix a full spectrum of colors using just your primary shades, we then learned about the relationships between complimentary colors and how you could use complimentary color mixing to your advantage. Finally, we brought it all together into a project where we explored color harmony and color relationships in a single composition. You are now equipped to go out and start mixing any shape that you wish to for your paintings. Feel free to revisit these lessons as many times as you need to so that color mixing starts becoming something very intuitive for you. I hope that through the duration of this class, you'll keep sharing your projects and your progress with me through the projects tab below. If you want to learn more about working with gouache, go over to my Skillshare profile because I have a couple of classes there. One is gouache 101 and one is gouache florals, both of which I think will be very helpful for you. Don't forget to follow me on Skillshare so that you don't miss any of my future classes and you can follow me on Instagram as well. Then go to YouTube and subscribe to my channel because I share a lot of tutorials and creative business tips there. I'm so excited that you've made it to the end of this class. Congratulations once again, and I'll see you all in the next one. Bye.