Master Watercolor Color Theory: Mixing, Techniques & Harmonies

1. Introduction: Hello, this is Lara and I welcome you to my course, watercolor Mixing Basics. In this course, we will do very, very simple exercises. So you can do it from any level. Even with little knowledge of watercolors. We are going to make a color wheel with a three primary colors. Yellow, magenta, and blue. I would tell you about the properties and qualities of color through some very simple exercises. You will know all the harmony types that exist. How to create a mixing chart from the colors you currently have in your palette. For the final exercise, we will do a color study like the one Kandinsky did in his painting, squares and concentric circles. You can take the course if you use other media. But note that we don't use white to lighten in colors. 2. Supplies: In this course, we will use two containers for water and a brush. It doesn't matter the size. But this is size four. In watercolors, it will be useful to have at least ten colors, but the main ones will be yellow, magenta, and blue. To better control the water, it will be great to use eyedropper and I'm mixing palette. We also need a pencil, a compass, scissors, and a ruler. I recommend using 100% cotton paper, at least for the mixing chart and some things you may want to keep. If you choose another paper, it will be great if it has at least a percentage of cotton. This one has twenty-five percent and is quite good. Also, you can use the leftover paper. You have. 3. Color wheel template: You can make your chromatic circle any size you want. I have done it in these smaller ones because as I want to keep it, it easy to handle it. But you can use any format you want. We take a compass and make a five centimetres radio. We pressed, and then we make the circle. Now we are going to use a pencil and a ruler and make a line from side-to-side. Now another to cross it. To separate it into two parts. We take the compass again, we put it at the end of the line and we do a mark. We do the same at each end of the line. We already have the circle divided into 12 parts. Now, we are going to make the segments always cross one end with the other. I've seen through the centre of the circumference. Let's draw a smaller inner circle. The size will be half of the previous one. Well done. We have finished the color wheel. Let's delete these lines and we'll be done. 4. Understanding the watercolor pigments: The pigments that make up, our watercolors are important when mixing colors. Because depending on the pigments they contain, that are suddenly mixtures will be different. We are going to mix the quinacridone magenta with three different yellow colors. The first yellow we are going to use is Indian yellow, from Daniel Smith brand. We are going to mix it with the magenta and see what kind of orange comes out. The next yellow is the lemon yellow from Mijello brand. And finally, we are going to use Hansa Yellow by Daniel Smith. This is a different yellow because it has orange shades. As you can see, depending on the yellow you use, you will get one type of orange or another. All the orange are beautiful, but as you may see, they are different. You can check the tag to see which pigment watercolor contains. This has PR 202. This one has two types PY 97 and PY 150. Mijello has a PY three pigment. And this one from Daniel Smith has a PY 65 pigment. In the lab. You can also check other things such as the light fastness, opacity, staining. You can check the resources of this course if you need additional information. 5. Painting the color wheel: In this lesson, I'm going to use the three primary colors and the three secondary colors. For the blue, I'm going to use this ultramarine blue. This one is lemon yellow, which is also supposed to be the purest primary color. For the red color, we would use magenta red. This one is quinacridone, magenta. Let's go with the secondary ones. The green that I have choose is bamboo green. But you can choose any green that you see that is neutral That neither tends to yellow nor too blue. I don't have a good orange. So I have to use this orange, yellow, which is quite intense. I don't have many violets, so I will use this bright violet. I will leave in the resources, a list of common names that can most closely approximate to the pure colors. There is variety and you may have some from the list. I usually mix the watercolours with water using this dropper because it's easier to handle and I'm going to use this ceramic palette. in a shape of a flower where I will place the primary here and the secondaries here. Let's think that the color wheel is a clock and set the yellow one at noon. Now we have to count from the one we painted, 1234, It's four o'clock and we're going to put on the magenta red. At eight o'clock. We are going to paint it with the ultramarine blue. Let's paint the secondaries here between the yellow and magenta will be the orange. Between magenta and blue will be the violet. And between blue and yellow will be green. If you're going to make your circle with the primary colors, only, have to mix the colors that are close to each other. And in the middle paint the secondary. I'm going to paint the secondary ones with the colors that I have. Instead of mixing them. I'm going to start with the orange. Here. We're going to place the violet. And finally, we paint the green. Before painting the tertiary colors, make sure that everything has dried Well, because if not, you will mess up your circle. I'm going to use the colors that I already have in the palette to make them tertiary. I will add some orange to this yellow and a tertiary color will be called orange. Yellow. Now, you can mix the orange with the magenta. We are going to repeat this process with every color. Congratulations, you have finished. Your color wheel. 6. Color properties: Hue: Hue is the name given to a color that distinguishes it from other colors. Let's make our review of all the shades, primary colors will be yellow, blue, and red. Secondary colors, orange, green, and violet. And between a primary and a secondary. In the middle. It will be for the tertiary color, which is yellow- green, blue-green, blue-violet, red-violet, red-orange and yellow-green. These are all the hues that we have. Let's do a test with the colors that I have here. Let's pick a color and see what it's hue is. Let's take for example, this yellow. This yellow is called hansa yellow, and it's actually an orange-yellow. This watercolor by Daniel Smith is called aussie red gold. And we already know that it's going to be an orange-red. The last one is a holbein color that I like very much. It's called it green leaf. This color is green but it has some yellow. So the hue, it's going to be yellow-green. You can try to do this exercise with the colors you currently have in your palette. 7. Color properties: Value: The value is the degree of lameness or darkness of a color. In watercolors, we don't need to use white to lighten a color. In fact, if we use white, the color will take a pastel hue. So water is needed for lightening. I'm going to choose the violet color, which is the darkest. But you can choose any other color. We're going to use the drop as it is stasis way to control the amount of water. But if you don't have a dropper, you will have to do it a little vi. This is a darkest color we can get in watercolor with very little water. Now, we're going to add a little more water with through drops. The color is much lighter than the previous one. So let's keep adding more water. Now. We're going to add two drops. Well, I have put forth to like them this color. I will need to put many water. So I'm going to do it again. You can try lighting this color in more steps and see how many steps do you get. For example, it could be up to ten, twice as many as we have done now. 8. Practical exercise: Value: Why is the value important? Let's see it with a very simple exercise. I have printed this photo in color and black and white. You can download it in the resources tab. Here you can see the light tones, the medium, and the darker ones that darkest on the scale will be this one. The medium colour or the value will be this one. The light one, more or less. This will be it. Let's draw this mushroom, but with a black color and its values. I have already drawn it. You can make a simple drawing or tracing it. Also, I'm going to leave a space because we'll paint another one in color late. The first thing we are going to do is to delimit the shadows in our drawing, there is a shadow here. So I'm going to delineate it in my drawing. We're going to skip this detail and I'm not going to draw it. No, I will limit the shadows on the top. To reserve the spots. We could use a masking liquid like this one. But if you don't have it, you can do it by hand. This is how I'm going to do it. Let's give our first layer two, all right, reserving only the spots. Now, let's paint the shadow of the mushroom foot and blur with a little water. This part of the most room is in darkness. So let's shade the whole thing. Let's paint another layer. If you don't like the hard edges, you can blur it with some water. Let's darken the color a little bit. I usually test on a separate piece of paper to see if the colors fits to me, the color is darker. So I'm going to paint it. I'm not going to continue along the most drama start because otherwise the colors when we mix. So I'm going to continue along the top part. Don't do it very detailed because this is only a test. If you don't like the hard edge, you can use water, but don't use so much water because you can mess up your painting. I think this is not as dark as I wanted, so let's make it a little darker. As you may see, this is a larger job. So let's keep layering your painting until you are satisfied. I'm not going to talk anymore in this video, but you can use it as a reference if you need to finish your paint. Are you still here with me? Thank you. We have finished the mushroom. 9. Color properties: Saturation: Saturation is the purity that has a hill. I sell to rate if color is a bit or intense color. To turn off the intensity or saturation of a color, you have to darken it by mixing it with its complimentary. If we take the color wheel we have made before, you can use the yellow with violet, orange with blue, or green with magenta. No need to use a good paper for this exercise. Let's paint the first circle with the yellow. For the next one, we're going to add very little violet in the yellow because Violet is a very strong darkest color. So with a little bit that we would donate, it's already going to quickly expand into the water. We do the same thing again. And as you can see, the color is more and more muted. Keep doing these steps over and over again until you see that the color is as good as possible. To saturate a color you have to use. It's complimentary. These are the steps I have to get from yellow to unmute it, or neutral color. We could keep doing steps and turn the color into its complimentary. Let's do the same, but using the black color. I'm going to use Daniel Smith neutral tint because it's the blackest color that I have to be careful when mixing the black with the yellow because we can drop of it. We conducted it enough. I'm going to paint the yellow circle. Here. I soiled the yellow color unintentionally, but since I haven't mixed it yet, I can use it. Now we have to repeat these steps as in the previous exercise. Make sure that there is always a color change here. More interesting, colors are always going to form where we use complimentary color. The black color will change the hue of the colors. Here we've got an olive green color. Therefore, to paint shadows, we would use the colors mix with their complimentary so as to more harmonious composition. It's always convenient to use neutral colors with other saturated colors to give more richness to your compositions. 10. Color properties summary: Now let's make a brief review of the color properties. This is the orange color. Or the same orange is its hue. To lighten it, we add some water. What we're working on here is the value or lightness to darken a color. Remember that we don't use black because it changed the hue. What we use is the complimentary color. You can try to do the exercise of converting a color to its complementary in several steps. We call this saturation or intensity. When you want to replicate a color, remember to find its hue, turn it off with its complimentary, and find the degree of lightness with water. 11. Understanding color: Temperature: On the color wheel, the lightest color is going to be the yellow and the darker color is going to be violet. We are talking about the luminosity of these colors. The warm colors are the colors ranging from yellow up to violet-red. And cool colors are the colors ranging from yellow- green to violet. So let's paint them. This six colors that I just painted would be the warm colors which are yellow, yellow, orange, orange, red-orange, red and red violet. I will now move on to paint the cool colors are starting from violet to yellow green. This will be the cool colors that are yellow-green, green, green-blue, blue, blue-violet, violet. There are two colors that are always going to be cool or warm. These colors are blue- green, and red-orange. No matter what colors we put near term, they will never change their temperature. I'm going to show you now with an example, but it means that the color change its temperature depending on the color next to it. This exercise is called warm and cool contrast. We are going to paint the violet and we're going to put cool colors next to it. As violet is already a cool color, there is not going to be any variation in its temperature. But what will happen if we have watercolor around the violet color? Violet color will acquire. That will look to us. This is called cool and warm contrast. 12. How to make muted colors: To get neutral colors, what you have to do is mix a color with its complimentary one, and that one range of colors there would be a wall infinity of neutral colors. They are also called moody colors, are muted colors. Let's pick one color. I'm going to use the yellow and we are going to mix it with its complimentary, which is the violet. And from there, we will get a neutral or muted color. Any color that with its complimentary, is going to give us a color of this type. But playing with the quantities of the mixtures, we will find a great variety of saturated colors. Don't think that I have a little obsession with yellow, violet, which is the one that I use in all the exercise. Let's try with red and green. Now. I'm using magenta, red, and green. But according with the colors you will use, you get one neutral color or another. It may seem that all these colors are the same, but if you look closely, you will see that they have some difference. What happens when we mix the three primary colors? The color that emerge is a black color. To get this black color, you will have to mix the primary colors in the same proportion. Now, you'll see that I have to mix them several times to get the black color. If you want to know better the colors that you have in your palette, I recommend you to take the lesson colored chart. 13. Exercise: Color studies: Let's do two oranges now. In the first one, we're going to use only one color. And in the second one, we are going to use several colours to see if there is any difference in these compositions. In the first layer we are going to give are rather watery orange, yellow color. Here. I have too much pigment, so I'm going to lighten it with a little bit of water because it has to be a first transparent layer. In the second layer, we are going to use an orange. I use an orange-red color, call it. Aussie red gold by Daniel Smith. Now, we will do the shadows and we can think about how we are going to darken the shadows. We will use the color orange, a little bit more pigment. We can continue adding orange. But as you might have realized, that no matter how much more orange we put, it's not going to change much or composition. Let's paint another orange using more colors. But in the first two layers, we will do the same as before. Now, to do the shades, we could mix orange with its complimentary. Or we can also use brown color as I'm doing now. Once dry, we could bend it with another little darker brown. Here are the two orange together. You may like them both. But the one with the most richness is the orange. On the right, we have use several colors. Let's try to make the shadows with an orange and its complimentary color. And let's see the results. To do this, we have to add a little blue to the orange. You know that if we mix two complimentary colors, the resulting color is going to give a neutro or muted color. So it will come out are kind of brown, which is the color I used before to shade the other orange. As you can see, the result it gives is much more interesting than if we just use orange. Do you remember the tonal value exercise that we did earlier? Let's do now this mushroom with several colors. We have to check the colors that the mushroom, and we are going to replicate it on the paper. The idea is the same because the mushroom will have medium tones, It's dark tones and the light tones here is red and white and maybe got some orange on it. But if you look closely here, we see a white color. I both we see an orange color, darker brown color. Here is our red and may be a darker red, mix it with violet. And also we find the color orange. For the most Romans, talc. I'm going to use an aqua color. Here. I'm going to use. Lately more pigment to darken it. I'm going to paint a base of orange on the cup. I'm going to paint the next layer with another orange color. Let's paint a mushrooms stalk. with a slightly more pigment at all. These weird at just our format because I have pulled out water. But since we are going to paint it in red, it doesn't matter. Now, let's use a mix of orange with magenta red. Let's do this shape with a darker brown color. In the next layer, I'm going to use I scarlet, red color. I'm going to add another layer of och-re here because I think it's still missing a little bit of tone. In the darker areas. The red is mix-up violet. So that's what I'm going to do. Let's mix the colors until I get the red that I want. The shadows I think should be darker. I'm going to keep darkening with brown color. I really like this red, so I'm going to give it another layer. Let's do now the shadow under the spots. I'm going to do it with the red color to Let's do the final touches with a little bit of blue. Guessed, a little gray on this box. And we have finished the mushoom. 14. Creating color harmony: Let's make our review of all the harmony types that exist. The first one will be the monochromatic one. We are going to choose a color and we're going to paint different tones of that color. The color I have chosen is the red. Remember that in watercolor will lighten with water. So we are going to make different shades playing with the water. We could even desaturate the color with its complimentary. This is what we have learned before about value and saturation. Now, let's talk about the analogous compositions, or harmony. It means that two or three colors and closing the color wheel. So I choose blue-green, green, and yellow green. Let's try another analogous harmony with the colors red, red-violet, violet. The triadic is when three colors are equidistant on the wheel, such as the primary colors, yellow, blue, and magenta. Let's try another triadic harmony. It could be with a secondary colors, which are orange, violet, and green. This type of harmony formed by an equilateral triangle is call it an equidistant, right? Complementaries are two colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel, as can be yellow, green, and red-violet. Other complimentary colors are yellow, orange, and blue-violet. Next harmony could be that double complimentary. You'd have to choose two colors and they're complimentary colors. It could be the form of a square or a rectangle. I'm going to choose orange, yellow, blue, and violet. Let's pick another four colors in the shape of a square. So it was orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. Let's make another one so that the colors don't look so similar. Let's choose red, yellow, orange, green, blue, violet. The next is the split complimentary. You need to pick a color and then pick the colors that are next to its complimentary. It will be yellow, blue, violet, and red violet. Let's choose a color again. In this case, we choose the orange on its adjacent of the complimentary would be blue-green, blue, violet. Let's do one last test. I'm going to choose another color. I'm going to choose blue green, and yellow, green. As I told you before, this will be the split complimentary and it will be formed by making an isosceles triangle. 15. Mixing chart: Choosing colors: In this lesson, we are going to make a mixing chart. Here you can see I'm mixing chart I made with 25 colors. That took me a lot of time. So we're going to do one of ten colors. If you have less colors, then you can make it smaller. And if you have more colors, I recommend you to choose only ten so that it doesn't take you too much time. These are the ten colors that I have chosen. Hansa yellow, Aussie red, quinacridone, magenta, bright violet, ultramarine blue, cobalt blue, cobalt turquoise, sap green, and burnt sienna. I have chosen these colors so that more or less all the hues of the color wheel are represented. The yellow is an orange-yellow, but it's a very nice color. The orange is pretty bright. I like the opera pink so much because mix it with other colors gives beautiful tones. Quinacridone, magenta is the primary color, violet is the secondary color. I like to have two blues because one is very dark and one is very light. Turquoise is a very nice clean blue. Sap green is my favorite green and burnt sienna for having a brown. Now, let's put the names in the first row, in the first column so that they match the first square. We will put the same name and so in the second and so on. To make this template, you have to see how big you want your squares to be. Mine, one by one centimetre. So they square is 11 by 11 because you have to add a row to put the names of the colors. Remember to put the names in the same order, both in the row, in the column. 16. Painting the mixing chart: For this lesson, I recommend you to use a flat surface because it will be served to mix all the colors that we have to do. I'm going to use this metallic one. Here. I have all the colors in the wells and I can mix it in the center. I'm going to use a dropper to activate the color because it controls the water better. My first color is called Hansa yellow. We will paint this color in the box where their role column names match. In this case, it will be in the first square. Now we are going to mix the original color, which is the hansa yellow with the color in the next row. That would be the Aussie Red Gold. As I have put water in the color, I'm going to paint a square where his name matches. And now is when we will mix the two colors. And we'll paint a square where the Hansa yellow and red color Match. Be careful when you are painting to not painting close to the other colors you have painted because it can mess it up. These square is the same as the other one. So I am going to put the same color but with more water. Let's continue with the color of the first row, which is hansa yellow. We have to mix with the opera pink. As I have put water on the opera pink, I will use it to paint the square when their name match. For now, the process will be always the same. Lets mix the column we have in the row with the color we have in the column. I'm not going to talk anymore until the end of the video, but you can follow it if you need more reference. These would be all finished mixing chart. I recommend you to take a look at the colors and see which ones you like most. I especially like the ones with the opera pink and turquoise blue. 17. Color chart: In this lesson, we are going to do a color chart in an original way. I have done it in circles, but you can do it in any way. You want. Rectangular or square. Circles, as you see, don't make them exactly like mine. Let's make a circumference whose radius is two centimeters. We could them out with scissors. But if you have a punch, you can do it much easier. To make our color chart, we can look at the mixing chat we do in the previous lesson. For example, a color that made catch. My attention is this one, which is a mix between violet and opera pink. We are going to paint a circle leaving a little margin so that we can write the name of the mixture. When it dries, we can write the name of the color. For example, this is a pure color. But if we make a mixture, we can put below the two colors that make it up. Let's try another color. I'm going to see the mixing chart. I look for another color I like. One of the colors that I also really like is turquoise blue. So let's paint a new circle with this color. You can also make the chart with the colors you currently have in your palate. It doesn't have to be mixtures. I'm going to show you all the colors I have painted for my color chart, and I'm going to order them as the color wheel. I have chosen these colors like this because it's one belongs to a hue in the color wheel. For example, yellow, orange, red, orange, magenta, red, violet, violet, blue, violet, blue, green, blue, green, yellow green. One way to keep your colors can be with a scrapbook album like this one I have here is a special mini album I have for Instagram. It's from the brand. We are memory keepers. But there are a lot of albums and formats you can use to keep your colors onto the colors we have painted are dry. We can write their name with a pencil. This was a mix of violet and opera pink, and I'm going to write it as in the margin. This color is not a mix, so I'm going to put the name of its color, which is turquoise. You can do your own color chart with all these colors that you like the most. 18. How to organize your palette: Let me show you how I organize my palette. These are all the watercolors that I currently have. And I have decided to put them in these wells at this middle box because before I used to use a ceramic palette where I put the watercolor and mixed it with water. But it made me waste a lot of paint. So I prefer to have it here in this metallic box where I put the watercolors and let them dry for a couple of days. I set them up a bit in order as they are in the color wheel. Here, I have put the colors that I find a special and that I think I'm going to use as opera pink, this cobalt blue, and some special Daniel Smith colors like lunar blue. What I have done is to choose two shades of each color. On this side, I have 15 colors, and on this side I have five colors. I have two greens, two browns, or they're yellow. I have a red and magenta, violet various blues and an indigo color. When you see that you have never used a color, you can replace it with another color. 19. Final project: We have finished the course. I hope you like it and you can leave your review. In this final practice, we are going to perform a version of Kandinsky painting, squares and concentric circles. I recommend you to look at the original painting and see the color relationships that Kandinsky used. You can do it by your own or do the scheme I have put in the resources I will give you now the guidelines that I have followed to make mine for this final project, what they have done is divide the sheets into 12 rectangles. There would be four rectangles for each row and a total of three rows. I'm not going to improvise. So I have made scheme with all the colors that I'm going to paint depending on their harmony, I'm going to use. The idea of this final project is that you use all the harmonies that we have learned. So I have monochromatic, primary, secondary, tertiary, analogues. Complimentary, split complimentary, and double complimentary. When painting your squares, keep in mind that they look better when their backgrounds are not pretty dark. In the yellow square, for example, I have printed it all over. And then I have painted the blue on top, which costs here in blue to look a bit like green color. If there is something that we don't like, we can use a white color to make some details. I use a gel pen and I'm going to add some final details because I think they will improve the composition. It's a very appropriate for all the levels since being an abstract painting. You don't have to know much about watercolors. Don't forget that if you have any questions, you can leave me a comment. We have already reached the end of the course and I want to thank you for taking your time to do it.