Mix Vibrant Watercolors : How to Mix Color Easily | Sade J | Skillshare
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Mix Vibrant Watercolors : How to Mix Color Easily

teacher avatar Sade J, Watercolorist & Illustrator

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      1:02

    • 2.

      Materials

      2:26

    • 3.

      Understanding Watercolor Tubes Understanding Watercolor Tubes

      4:33

    • 4.

      Choosing Colors for Maximum Mixing Possibilities :The Split Primary Palette

      2:19

    • 5.

      Watercolor Tips

      1:56

    • 6.

      Swatching Watercolors

      4:44

    • 7.

      Your watercolor steering wheel: making and using a color wheel

      2:31

    • 8.

      What are warm and cool colors anyway?

      4:25

    • 9.

      The Rules of Painting: Simple Color Theory

      1:55

    • 10.

      Organizing your palette for maximum success: a physical color wheel

      0:48

    • 11.

      From Light to Dark: The Tonal Range Chart

      1:40

    • 12.

      Explore a Rainbow of Colors: Creating a Palette Chart

      3:33

    • 13.

      Zooming in on Colors: the Watercolor Spectrum Chart

      3:11

    • 14.

      A simple tool for pinpointing colors: the color isolator

      0:51

    • 15.

      Isolating colors digitally in Photoshop

      0:54

    • 16.

      Let's Paint A Tarte!

      27:49

    • 17.

      Wrap up

      0:54

    • 18.

      Thank You!

      0:17

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About This Class

This course is designed for anyone who wants to learn how to mix the perfect shade in watercolor quickly and easily every time. Whether you are just starting to use watercolor, or you can already paint flat washes like a PRO, you'll learn tips and tricks that will show you how simple it is to put the color you imagine right onto the page.

We will start at the very beginning and move on to all of the techniques that can help you create beautiful paintings. Whether you like painting flowers, animals, buildings, or portraits, by the end of this course, you will have new skills that will help you to choose just the right colors for your subjects!

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

Watercolors are such a joy to work with, but there is one big problem that many people run into. Just how do you mix all of these beautiful pans and tubes of color to make the image that you have in your mind? I will show you how to get to know your watercolors, explore them, and figure out color mixtures that you would never have attempted before.

  • Assemble A Simple And Versatile Watercolor Palette
  • Learn The Specific Qualities Of Your Watercolor Paints
  • Create Your Own Color Wheel
  • Make Resources That Will Continually Make Your Mixing Process Easier
  • Combine Colors To Make Them As Vibrant As Possible Using Simple Color Theory
  • Isolate Colors In An Image Or In Real Life In Order To Accurately Identify Them
  • Put All Of This Information Together To Create A Beautiful Painting!

This course is meant to give you all of the knowledge you will need to start making new colors from the paints that you already have . Not only will you be able to mix the colors shown in this course, but you will be able to make any color that you can dream of on your own with these techniques!

WHAT YOU WILL NEED

These are the tools that I recommend you use for this course. It's not necessary to get the exact same brands, or the exact same colors, but these are the ones that I have had the most success with.

  • Watercolor Paper : I recommend a cold press paper because it is easier for colors to flow on this type of paper. My favorite is Fabriano Artistico 300gsm
  • Watercolor Paint : I recommend a single pigment combination of warm and cool blue, warm and cool red, and warm and cool yellow. See this document for my recommended colors.
  • Watercolor Brushes: I recommend a synthetic flat and a synthetic round brush. My favorites are the DaVinci Cosmotop line and the ProArte Prolene Plus line.

ARE YOU READY? LET'S GO!

I am so excited to get started, and I can't wait to see the beautiful things you will make in your class project!

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The music in this course is Lee Rosevere's "Tech Toys," through creative commons license.

The emoji featured in the end is used from Emoji One through creative commons license. 

Meet Your Teacher

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Sade J

Watercolorist & Illustrator

Teacher

I love painting with watercolors and making beautiful things come to life!

YouTube | Instagram | Pinterest | Blog | Patreon | Website

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm shot. A guard is behind Sadie scenes a day. I love using all the beautiful characteristics of watercolor to Canadian realistic botanical paintings. I know that it is not always easy to take the colors that you have in your palate and put them on paper so that they look like the object that's sitting right in front of you. This class is for anyone who has ever struggled to figure out the right color palette for a painting, or for anyone who just couldn't figure out how to mix colors just right. Mixing colors doesn't have to be hard. It should be fun. Together we will cover every step to get you on the path to confident color mixing. By the end of this course, I hope that you will have learned all the skills to make any painting that you can dream. I just can't wait to see what he could not with. So click enroll and we can get started 2. Materials: Okay, let's talk about materials. There are a few things that you'll need for this course watercolor paper. Make sure to use watercolor paper and not regular printer or notebook paper. I will be using far Briana artist ical Cold press paper in 300 grams per square meter. I would have been starting with cold pressed paper because it's easier to control the watercolor. Also, the colors makes a lot easier on cold press paper brushes. I recommend that you use synthetic brushes for your chart making because mixing so many colors can be really rough on your Russians. Also, sable brushes hold a lot more water than synthetic brushes, and you don't want your mixes to be too watery. Synthetic brushes are also much easier for beginners to control water. You're going to need a lot a water. I recommend at least two jugs of water. One of them is for clean water and the other for dirty water. I use three jugs because that water gets really dirty really fast. When you're making charts, you don't have to buy any kind of fancy painting water jugs. Just use whatever you have around the house. I have one 23 Pickle jaws obviously electricals some rags. You need something to life your brush. It doesn't really matter what it is. I used some old rags, but you could also use paper towels tissue paper In addition to the rags or paper towel that you will use to clean your brush. You need something to pick up watercolor from the paper if you're lifting, or if you make a mistake, tissue paper is perfectly wrap a pencil and the waterproof 10. You'll be needing these to make the charts that you'll be completing in this scores. All pencils are waterproof, but make sure that your pen is also waterproof. Otherwise, when you paint over at, the lines will smear all over the place. And that is totally not fun. Watercolor pain. And finally, of course, you need some pain. It doesn't matter what kind of palette use if you use tubes or pans, are what brand. You just need some kind of pain later on. In the course. Our medicaments. Six colors at work perfectly together. If you're curious about what specific brands I recommend for cheaper or more expensive options, took out the materials list linked in your project section 3. Understanding Watercolor Tubes Understanding Watercolor Tubes: Before you do anything else, you have to understand your pain. If it comes from a respectable brand, your tube of watercolor will have a lot of information on it. For a new watercolor is this could be really confusing, So I'm going to help you understand all of that jargon. Every brand is going to be a little different. The name could come in different languages. They might use different symbols, but a few things are the same. First there's the painting. You might think that this should be the same across manufacturers, but every brand seems to use different names for their pains. Paint names seem to vary between brands, and this could mean that the paint with the exact same name can have totally different things inside. And that's why you need pigment numbers. Pigment numbers are basically the ingredients list of watercolors. They tell you exactly what's inside a tube of watercolor. It goes like this. It's a two letter system with two or three numbers falling behind it. For example, there could be something like P B 29 that's P for pigment B for blue and 29 for Number 29 in this case pp 29 is ultra marine blue. You might see more than one pigment number listed on the two. That means that this is a multi pigment Lauder Cohen. There's nothing inherently wrong with these, but I tried to use only single pigment watercolors. Think about it like this. If there's only one ingredient in the tube, it's a lot easier for you to mix things together because you know exactly what you put into any color mixture. If there's already four or five ingredients in the tube, how can you remember all of the colors that you just mix together when you add another two or free because of the single pigment, pains are a lot easier to get clean, clear, vibrant mixes from. So that's definitely what I would recommend. The next thing on your tube pan is the light Fastness rain. This is something that I really which is more consistent once brands, but everybody seems to have a different thing. There might be letters they might be Roman numerals, and like stars, who knows The point is permanent is what lets us know whether a paint will disappear from your paper really quickly or whether it will last a long time. Some artists don't think that this is a very important thing, and I don't know if I agree with that. Even if you don't expect your work to hang in a museum someday, what about your future Children or nieces or nephews? Or you can even think about the scientific aspects. Things that seem really commonplace to us today may not be so commonplace in the future, and scientists or researchers could be able to use your drawing or something as simple is even to McDonald's burger to make a discovery. It's because of that that I always try to use high permanent pains. Next is Bill Cassidy. Capacity is whether or not you can see the white of the paper behind. A pain Capacity is not a good or bad thing in and of itself, but many water coz prize transparency Bull Paige Pains can be really good for certain circumstances, but they tend to be more difficult to mix into vibrant colors staining. This is how difficult it is to remove paint. Once it's been put down on the page, something pains are highly staining. That means as soon as you put it down that is not going to bud. Other pains are lowest staining, which means you can describe that in a little, and it will live it up completely. You might want to use ah, high staining pain If you're going to do a ton of layers on top, and you want to make sure that it stays put, you might want to use a low staining pain if you think you might make a mistake or you're planning on using a lot of lifting techniques that would make your life a lot easier. Finally, various regulation regulation is caused when larger pigments fall out of the solution novel , watercolor and gather together in little clubs. Some people think that this looks beautiful, I dio, and some people don't like it. You can also be kind of confusing for beginning water Color is, but I think that it can add a really nice texture when you're painting things like rocks or landscapes. On the other hand, you may not want to use granulated pains for things like skin, and that's it. Now you know how to read a Water Co two 4. Choosing Colors for Maximum Mixing Possibilities :The Split Primary Palette: in the material section, I mentioned that pain is an important material in this course. I showed you my palate, which is just full to bursting with watercolors. But you don't need 100 40 or even 20 colors to mix just about every shade that you can think of. You only need six. Actually, if you want to be really extreme, you can paint with only three colors red, yellow and blue. But things are a lot easier with six colors instead of three. I recommend choosing these colors instead of buying big sets, because those beginner sets often don't come with all the colors that are most efficient mixing. And it can be really frustrating. You end up spending a lot of money on shades and colors that are just not helpful. So I do that when you can buy just six pans of color palette that I'm going to recommend. Team is called the Split Primary Palette. You may have heard of the split primary palate before, but there is one thing that many people. Yet it's really important that the colors are very different from one another. Think about your palate, lechon it if you're notice small. You won't catch many fish, but if it's wide catch a time. So if the colors are very different from each other, it's like having your net stretched wide. You can catch as many colors as possible, if that's not too weird. All right, enough talking. Let's get to the colors. Here's a palate. Better recommend. I have tested all of these colors to make sure that makes together easily. They're all single pigment, transparent colors. I recommend P Y 1 75 a cool or greenish L O G Y in 97 a warm or orangish yellow T 0 73 a warm or oranges red pr 1 22 a cool or purplish red, P B 29 a warm or purple blue and PB 15. Pull in three. A cool or greenish blue. It doesn't matter what brand you use, as long as you have these pigment numbers with these watercolor to convict all kinds of beautiful secondary and tertiary colors. If you're not sure how to find the pigment in the brand that you want to use, I have attached a chart that shows you how to find the correct pigment number in many different common brands. Now is the time for the first part of your course project. She as the colors that you're going to use and take a picture of your split primary palette . Get some paper and start having fun with your pain. Then I want you to show your palate to us in the core section. 5. Watercolor Tips: Now that you have all your colors picked out, we can actually start painting. But first I have a couple of trips for you. Number one. Always add dark colors to light colors. This is because it's really easy for dark colors to overwhelm light ones. Then you have to use way more light pigment to get it back to the shade you were aiming for . That's a waste of pigment number to add opaque pigments to transparent ones. Opaque pigments can overwhelm transparent pigments and make transparent pigments opaque really quickly. You can always make a color more opaque, but it is very difficult to make a color more transparent. Number three Add staining colors to non staining colors. You can probably guess where does it's going. Stating colors tend to be way more powerful than non staining colors, so if you add just a tiny bit, they overwhelmed the entire paint mixture. So make sure to add a small amount in the beginning, especially with colors like halo blue. Tip number four colors dry lighted and they appear when they're wet. This is the case for any kind of letter color, whether they are high or low quality they appear much more saturated when wet than when they're driving. So it's really important to try to get to know what your pains will look like when they're dry, so that you can account for that when you're painting. Number five Always pain from light to dark. Unlike other mediums like oils or acrylics, watercolor is actually painted from light to dark. It's always possible to get darker with watercolor. But since the white in watercolor is not paying but the white of the paper, you can't really get that back once you've lost it. So you need to make sure to work your way up to darker colors in transparent flushes so that my for tips add Dr Light. Add okay, too transparent. Add staining to non staining colors. Dry lighter than they appear and work from light to dark. Got it? Good. Let's get painting 6. Swatching Watercolors: Now it's time to get to know your watercolors. Color mixing is all about knowing your pains and swatting them is the first step in getting to know them better. Manufacturers test their water colors, but depending on how you use them, you might have a different experience. So switching out each of your colors really tells you how a watercolor work from you. Plus, you'll get to have a handy reference so that you won't have to guess how the water colors will look on paper. A lot of people have different ways that they watch their water colors. Some of them are simpler, and some of them are more complex. Here is how I suggest that he's watching watercolors to get all of the information that you might need an efficient way in a small space. I designed these little swatch tabs so that you can put basically any information that you might possibly need about a paint into one little rectangle. Here are all of the sections pigment number. As I just explained, every pain comes with the paint name. But to really know what's inside the paint, you need to know the pigment number. So that's a very first square that we have here. Color name. If you're like most people, you probably don't go around saying things like P B 29 or PV 15 Colon three. So you might want to know the regular name for things like cool to Marine or Sailor Blue. So I have a space for that here. Permanency. As I said before, this is a section that talks about the light Fastness of a paint. You can record the manufacturers life Fastness rating here, or you can do your own test for, like, Fastness and record. I hear staining. This is how difficult it is to remove a water color paint from the page. Once it's been put down, a paint can be staining non staining or semi staining O Cassidy. This is how much a watercolor covers up the light of the page. The pain can be bough cake, semi opaque, semi transparent or transparent regulation. This is just so that you know if the pain, granulated or not, the next section tests a few things. First of all, use a waterproof pen to draw a line across the first tick mark in the box. This is to help us test for transparency. Next, wet the box entirely after that, take some of the paint that you're going to swatch and painted down from the top of the box to the last tick mark that is in there. That's about halfway through. By doing this, we can see what the paint looks like when it is painted into a wash. Once the paint is dry, draw another line on the second tick mark of the box. This allows us to compare what the black line looks like over pain and under the pain. If it looks exactly the same, then the pain is totally transparent. If it looks a little different, then it is at assembly, transparent or semi opaque, and if it is totally covered up or mostly covered up, then it is opaque. The next step is to take a slightly stiff brush, dip it in water and rub it around the third check mark, rub it across the entire body and then pick up the paint with some tissue paper. I did this three times. This is to test the staining if the pain comes off entirely painted non staining. If it kind of comes off than at semi staining, and if it basically doesn't come off, then it is definitely standing. Check your halo pain. That's probably gonna be the most staining pain that you have. Let's move on to the box labeled dispersion. This test will tell you how the paint moves if it's put into a wet area, this is really helpful. If you want to just drop in a little pain here, there. If you know that the painting lose a lot, then you will put less pain. If you know that the pain doesn't move so much, might not use it for those kind of lowly paintings, wet the entire fogs and then take a bit of pain and just touch the tip of your brush into the left hand side of the box. Leave it alone and let it flow. This is important because they paint with high dispersion will spread out a lot in your painting. If you want a bit more control or that's difficult for you, then you're gonna be looking for something with lower dispersion. But if you want a paint that spreads out easily and mixes with other colors very quickly, then you're gonna wanna pain with high dispersion. The next spots is enabled mass tone. This is just the regular color of the pain so that you know what it looks like without being in a wash or dispersed or anything like that. Just dip your brush into the paint and feel in that box. The last box is just a space for you to put the manufacture knee, and there you have it. You have completed your own swatch that gives you all of the information you could ever need to know about your pains. If you want to use a swatch format that I created, there is a pdf linked in the resource section. So let me see your color swatches. Create a color swatches for the paints that you chose and let us see it in your class project. 7. Your watercolor steering wheel: making and using a color wheel: that color meal. You've probably seen one of these in an art start before, but what is it and what do you use? A core? The color wheel is just what it sounds like. It's a selection of colors arranged in a well that helps us to understand color relations. There have been different shapes and different choices of colors, but the one we're going to talk about is this circle with a hexagon. Inside, there are many different things that you can use a color wheel core, but we're going to use the code of your toe. Understand color relationships for mixing. Using this color wheel, you'll understand primary, secondary and tertiary colors working well. Let our primary colors. Primary colors are colors that cannot be mixed from other colors. Traditionally, these are red, blue and yellow. You know the stuff they taught you in elementary school. Some artists still use this traditional palate, but I prefer a slightly different one. It's called the C M Y Power. Instead of red, little and yellow, you have cyan and magenta and yellow. I find that you can make red and blue from cyan, magenta and yellow, so there's not really a reason to consider those primary colors in the colors that I have suggested to you. The warm key y 97 Dehlin, blue and critically don't magenta or purple magenta curse farm to magenta, cyan and yellow. Okay, so enough talking, let's get to making color. Real primary colors fill in the centre triangle, and they also are arranged equally spaced around the outer ring. There should be three boxes between each of them. The secondary colors are the mixture of primary colors. Thes are orange, purple and green. Then they also go one space away from the primary colors On the out of you, the tertiary colors are secondary colors that haven't shifted in one way or the other. They are the combination of one secondary color on one primary color. Their colors like yellow, red or greenish blue. You can fill in all the gaps on the color of your with these colors. Look at how many colors you can make with just six colors. If you would like to use its template that I have made, check that out in the B C section. Also, it's time to share again. Let me see what you're color wheel looks like. Shirt with us in your class project 8. What are warm and cool colors anyway?: now that we have our color. Real time for a little simple color. Very first of all, what are warm and cool colors? Anyway? This is a big question amongst old and you painters like there's a lot of arguments about it, but I'm going to keep it simple. What air? The warm colors. The one colors are red, orange and yellow, and the co colors are blue, green and purple. I've been talking to you this whole time about warm reds and cool reds and warm blues and coal blooms. But how can there be a cool red if red is a warm color? Or how can there be a warm blue with musical color? That's a little confusing, isn't it? Well, this was super difficult for me. I really thought I was never going to be able to learn how to mix colors because I could not understand this concept. Whenever anyone was talking about a warm color, a cool color, I could just not see what they were talking about. But then I finally figured out a technique that made it super easy, and I'm going to explain it to you right now, so take out your car Leo, look at the square that you've painted red or magenta on either side of this square. There should be a treasury color. One of the tertiary color is leans yellow, and one of the tertiary colors leans blue. Look at the tertiary color that is closer to yellow. If you had to choose between saying that color is closer, toe, orange or closer to purple, what would you say? Aren't right? Well, that means it's a warm red. And if you look at the other side and thought that that red clothes a purple I mean that red is a cool. Read that simple right? Look at your color wheel again. The reason why I choose the color meal with the hexagonal on inside is because it makes this distinction really easy for us. On either side of the Red Triangle, we have the colors that tell us whether that red is cool or warm. On one side of the red triangle is an orange triangle that's the warm side. On the other side of the red triangle is the Purple Triangle. That's a cool side. You can do this trick for all of the primaries on either side of the blue is purple and green. If blue looks kind of purple, then it's warm. If a blue looks kind of green, then it's cool. On either side of the yellow are green and orange. If the yellow looks kind of orange, it's warm. If the yellow looks kind of green, it's cool. All you have to do is remember that, and you will never be stuck again. Okay, it's time for a test. Does this red look? More orange are purple. What about this one? Did you get it right? Okay. What about yellow? Is this yellow in orange? Yellow or green? Yellow? What about this one? Is this blue? Purple blue or a green? Blue? What about this one? How did you do? Did you get it? You can try more tests until it's super easy for you to identify the difference between warm and cool colors. Just one final note for something using blue is really weird and some people switch the order of blue. For some people, a warm blue is green, leaning on a cool blueish purple leaning because it's in a weird space on the color wheel. But for the purposes of this class. It's also just easier to understand that a blue with a green bias is cool, and the blue with a purple bias is warm. 9. The Rules of Painting: Simple Color Theory: Now that you have on awesome color wheel and a basic understanding of color theory, it's kind of flip those two to work. Just how does this information help you mix? Beautiful colors. First of all, how do you make more vibrant or saturated color? You do that by mixing colors that are as close together as possible on the color Leo. For example, if you want to make a really saturated purple, what do you do? Well, let's look at the color real red and blue. Make purple, but which red and blue you want the red that is closest to purple and the blue that is closest to purple. So that means a warm blue and a cool red that would make the most five and purple that you could cause him to make. What about if you want to make some darker or de saturated colors, which is really important for mixing neutrals? Natural colors and shadows, while you have to do is the opposite mix colors that are as far away as possible from one another on the car. Real thes air called complementary colors. Complementary colors are colors that are directly across from each other on the color wheel that would be yellow and purple, blue and orange and red and green. They're called complementary colors, because if you put them next to one another, they really help each other pop out. But if you mix them together, they neutralize into a kind of brown or grey or even black. This knowledge is really helpful for making natural colors. You can also use this color just to turn down colors a little bit. For example, what if you wanted to make just a slightly darker or dollar green to make it look more like a? Naturally, If you said that you would add a little bit of red or a little bit of orange to bring it down a little bit, you'd be correct. Adding orange to green makes beautiful foliage and grass colors. Play around with your paints and see what you can make. Ask yourself. How do I make the most vibrant version of this color, or how do I make a dollar version of this color? Then try to mix it and see if you're correct. These exercises will help you to be able to pinpoint your color mixes later on 10. Organizing your palette for maximum success: a physical color wheel: There are a ton of different ways to organize your palate, but here's one that I find to be really useful for remembering how to mix. I arrange my colors according to the color real. I start with cool yellow and work my way all the way around to warm green. I don't have my brown at the end, but integrated in with the rest of the colors because they're just do Saturday yellows and oranges. Arranging my palate this way makes mixing super easy. If I want to mix a violent purple, all I have to do is mix the red and blue better closest to one another. Since that should be the coolest red and the warmest blue that I have, it should make the most vibrant purple that I could possibly make use what that concept would look like with the six color split primary palette that I have introduced you. You don't have to arrange your colors this way, but I find it really helpful 11. From Light to Dark: The Tonal Range Chart: Now that you have chosen your pains, swatch them out and organize them nicely. We're going to look at the tonal range. Earlier use watched out your pain so that you know what they look like. But did you know that you can get more than 1 10 from just one color? The total range chart shows you all of your chins, from the lightest lights to the darkest darks. So let's get started. You can. Either you draw out a series of nine squares right next to one another, or use the template that I have provided for you in the resource section. First, mix up a batch of the color that you want to explore, then diluted until the wash is very pale. Test this on a little strip of paper to make sure that it is paling up. Once that's done, paint the diluted mixture over all nine squares. Wait for it to drive. That might take 10 to 30 minutes, depending on the humidity where you live. What's all this girl's air? Dry paint over only the eight squares to the right. This will darken up all of those squares. Let that drive, then continue painting the seven right, most squares to six, right? Most squares, the high right Musgraves until you're down to the last one. Once you're all done painting all of these in sequence, you should have a tonal range chart that shows you what your color looks like at the lowest and highest saturation. Now you can easily see just how much pigment you need to use to make a very saturated color , or just how light you need to be. If you want to make a pastel or see the color, now it's your turn. Make a total chart of a few colors and added to your class project. 12. Explore a Rainbow of Colors: Creating a Palette Chart: this chart is the most important chart for watercolors. If you don't make any of the other times, please make this one. A pallet chart really opens your eyes upto all the colors that could be mixed from your palate. Without it, you might end up relying on convenience mixtures or buying times of expensive paint that you don't really need. A lot of those colors may not even be is beautiful. Is a cozy convicts by yourself? Did I convince yet? Let's make a chart first chooses size were swatches. You can choose something like one inch by one inch or one centimeter violence centimeter. You can even do circles our hearts instead of squares, but we're gonna keep it simple. You're gonna make the same number of squares as paints that you're going to swatch along the length and with the box. For example, if you have six pains, the box should be six squares high and six squares wide. Make sure that they are spaces in between each of your square so that the paint doesn't overflow. Write the name or pick the number of your pain on the inside of each of the columns in the boxing order. Start with the cool yellow. Make a big pool of oil that you would use to fill in the entire road. Paint that in the first square were both the horizontal and the murder co column is labeled Cool Yellow. Next, makes a little of the warm yellow into a corner of the pool. And put that where the columns of warm yellow and Kolya intersect. Now, when you're feeling out this child, you can end up with doubles of the same color. So what I decided to do instead, it's actually put a diluted region on the other side. So dunk your Russian water ones and then and then put the diluted pigment on the other side of the chart. Worry the warm and cool yellow intersect. Now we're going to continue like this until the whole charges finished. Okay. In the end, I put a darker line around the unmixed swatches just so that I can see the separation between the two sides of the chart. By creating this chart, you're forced to make all the color drained crab available, even color combinations that you wouldn't have thought of otherwise. It's a really great way to see just how huge of a range of colors you can make with only six colors. Did any of the mixture surprise you? Which ones? Which ones were your favorite? Which one? Release favorite. Make your own palette chart in the class project and let us know what you learned. 13. Zooming in on Colors: the Watercolor Spectrum Chart: the water color spectrum chart is the chart that you need to pinpoint your colors in the palette chart. He makes a 50 50 mixture off all of your pains in your palate, but there are a 1,000,000 different ways to Swatch. Just two colors. So how do you figure that out with the water cooler expecting char? Think about it as taking your palate er and zooming into just one little square. And then you expand that square to get six different portions. Not only will you get to see how the two different colors interact, but you also even get to see how those colors tend and change with more water and devolution. How to make the chart make a series of squares five cigars high and dirty squares. Why, just like when he made the palate chart, put a little space in between them so that the paint doesn't overrun. How to fill in the trip? Choose to colors that you wanted makes together. You might have a favorite color, or you might have a color you want to explore from when you made your palate. I was curious about the Browns that were made by combining warm red and cool blue. I was also interested in the purples that can be made from cool, red and warm blue. Finally, the peaches that could be made from coal, yellow and cold. That seemed really cute, so I wanted to check those out right the name of the two colors that you're going to be exploring on either end of your chart. Take the lighter or less staining colored and make a large batch of it. Put this in the first square on the top of your chart. I looked this mixture a little bit and put that in the second column of the first well diluted again. And put that in the third column of first row. Next, take a little bit of the second color and makes it into the pool of the first color. Put that in the second box, dilute that, put it in the second column of the second and dilute Again and put it in the third column on the Second World. Continue like this until you read the second to last row in the last road that the unmixed , undiluted color in the first box of the last row dilute it once put that in this second column and I looted again. Put that in the third column. Now you're done. Now you have a beautiful range showing what those two colors look like as you mix them together. Not only that, but you can also see what they will look like when they are more diluted in less intense, which could be different than what you see in the past. Home was that fun? Help her. Waas! I want to see what colors you mix together. Show me in your class project. 14. A simple tool for pinpointing colors: the color isolator: I'm going to show you how to use this toe. Isolate colors in watercolor after making all of these charts making a color, isolator is going to be a breeze color. Isolators are really simple, but they're also really helpful. It can be very difficult to figure out what the actual color is in the scene or object in front of you are. By blocking out most of the external information. It's much easier to see what color you're aiming for. How do you make it? Just take a study piece of black or white paper. I used watercolor paper and put a hole in it. That's it. You're done. Take your color isolator and place it over the area that you want to check, and then you can see the rial color that you're shooting for. It can be used for objects both near and far. Using the color isolator. You can really tell the difference between the highlights, the shadows and the mid tones in an object 15. Isolating colors digitally in Photoshop: There's another way to isolate colors, but this one requires a computer. If you have a photo of an object, you can use a graphics editing software like Photoshopped Kim or pixel later to precisely identify the colors in your subject. In whatever photo editing software you have, open up your photo, then create a white palette to the side of your photo. This is where you're going to be putting your color samples using the color dropper tool sample of the area that you want to identify. Then, using the brush tool, paint a little spot to the side of the photo. You can keep this file digitally and use it as a reference on your tablet or laptop. You can also print out this reference and use it while you're painting. The advantage of this method is that you really get to see the exact shade of whatever you're picking up. It's useful, isn't it? 16. Let's Paint A Tarte!: So after all decks, watching color mixing and charting, let's finally put that together and paint a tart. The first part of this is to look at what you're painting. I'm trying to see what are the actual colors of the Berries that are on this tart. They're not just read the various different colors inside the blueberries air not just blue , but gray and purple. The first thing that I'm going to do is use masking fluid. There are a lot of very shiny parts of the tart, and in order to preserve that look, it's easier to use masking fluid than to paint around those spots. An important thing to know about masking fluid is that it will ruin your brushes. So I'm mixed up a batch of soapy water to rinse off my brush, and that preserves my brush from getting completely destroyed. Then I put the masking fluid on all of the little seeds of the strawberries and all of the highlights on the tart. Once that's done, you have to make sure to let it dry completely and thoroughly, because otherwise you will get the latex on your brush and you'll destroy it once the masking fluid is dry and you touched it, and it's no longer tacky. It's time to look at the tart again. So what color is closest to that of the blueberries? You can go back to your color palette chart. The color that is closest is the mixture of cool blue and warm red, which made this kind of bluish gray. So I'm mixing up a batch of warm red and adding the cool blue to it and testing on a little strip of paper until I get the shade that I want. When I'm like that down there for you to see, it's a very dilute mixture of clue blue and one red. Now this is just a blocking in stage, so I'm just filling in all of the's blueberries with this color. Next, we have these two blueberries on the right, but they're a little different. They're a bit more purple, so I mixed up the same mixture. But I added, I just a little bit of the cool red to make the mixture little purple, and then I diluted it. Then those go on those more purple e blueberries. I make sure to avoid the highlights that I have left here that are a little bigger than the ones that covered the masking fluid. Now for those raspberries or Blackberrys that's very similar to just basically the cool red . But I add a little bit of warm blue and a little bit of Rome red to make it slightly purple earlier. But not very much. Of course, this is all very dilute. Now I'm looking at the strawberries. What I notice is that they're very, very warm color. And actually the whole tart is very warm and golden in color because it has a sort of golden syrup all over it. So I mixed up a combination of warm yellow and warm read just a little bit of warm red, and I start putting that basically anywhere where that syrup is or where it seems a little warmer in the painting that's gonna cover a lot of the strawberries and kind of tried to avoid the cool areas. Now I'm going to add in the shadow if we remember on our water kill expecting chart. I was able to get really dark color by combining warm red and cool blue, so that's what I'm going to do here and very easily got this very dark color. It doesn't have to be accurate. And put that down underneath the tart. Until now, I'm going to mix up some red for the strawberries, which is a very warm sort of red, but not just totally orangey red. That's gonna be a combination of cool red and warm red. And I'm gonna put that on the strawberries. You see how the red looks different in the areas that we have already applied the yellow, making it warmer, just like it is in the picture. You can tell that the way that we're layering the colors is already starting to work for us . Like I'm also adding the red really super diluted in the shadows because the shadows have a little bit of the reflection off the strawberries and them. So that's how you're going to get those nice, warm shadows that look like those straw buyers are actually sitting on the custard. Then next I'm looking at the tut and the color on our palate chart that looks closeness to that is the mixture of the cool yellow and the cool red. So I start mixing that up with a ton of cool yellow because I wanted to be a little yellow er and this is nice, but I add a little bit of warm blue to de saturated and a little bit of warm yellow to make it just a little bit warmer instead of cool. You can see I do a lot of tries to get this one right, and that's okay. Okay. So in the end, that gets heavily diluted like everything else. And I added all over the crest area. Now I'm going back into the blueberries. But this time I'm going to make their mixture more saturated the same mixture as I use before, just more concentrated. The brush ducks that I'm using are kind of streaky because the blueberry has thes kind of streaking marks on it. So I'm going in all of the areas that are darkest and avoiding the highlights to get the same sort of structure that I see in the picture. Now I'm doing the same thing with the purple. I'm mixing up the same colors as I did before, just more concentrated and adding that to the more purple lee blueberry that's behind there . Starting in the darkest part of the blueberry and working my way around. If you ever add a little too much or you wanted to be a little lighter, you can go in with a tissue. If you want an area to be a little softer, you can just take your brush and put it in some water but not dripping wet and go over that line again to blend out the color. I use that technique a lot. I'm taking the same purple in, putting it on the blueberries through the right because they're a little warmer. Next, I'm going in on those raspberries, mixing up more concentrated vision of that badge, checking it on the paper. That's really important. And then the first thing I'm going to do, I'm not gonna paint the bulbs of the raspberry. I'm going to paint. Actually, all the little Curtis's in between, because those are the darkest parts of the raspberry and what really give it that raspberry shape. It's important not to just draw circles around the bulbs, but to try to follow the way that the shadow falls on the picture. This blueberry, for whatever it is back there is very blurry, so you don't have to be to specific with how the colors are. Now I'm mixing up that red for the strawberries again, and this time I'm adding it, just like everywhere else, the first and all of the shadow areas. So underneath the Joe on the bottom of the strawberry, where there's no light, basically everything to the right hand side of the tart is in more shadow than everything on the left hand side. And I'm softening out. Does that Jews with a second brush that just has clear water in it and no pain. That's why sometimes you'll seem you look like I'm dual wielding paintbrushes, even though those strawberries on the right are a bit cooler than the strawberries on the left. I'm still using this warm mixture because it is much easier to cool down something than to warm it up later. Now I'm mixing up that complicated heart color again. You can see it takes me a couple tries, and then I'm going in and putting that color in the crevices of the tar and behind that jelly. And remember everything on the left hand side is a bit more in shade, and also, I add a little bit more on the bottom of the tart and on the inner side of the chart. On the left hand side, this is already starting to help give it a little bit more form in the crust. I had a little bit of that underneath the strawberries because it seems to be a nice color for the shadow of the cream. It's always a good idea to repeat the same color in many places because I will give your painting a coherent feel, protected at super dark color and mixing that, um, were concentrated and just putting it in there underneath the tarp. You don't really have to worry about this. You can choose whatever color you want. Just get it nice and dark. I'm also softening this out with a little bit of water. This helps us to see how dark the tart itself needs to get so back to that jelly color. I'm mixing it up a lot more, concentrated to the point where it almost looks like egg yolk, making sure that my brush is really clean because if you have a dirty brush when you're working with yellow, it's a real mess, so I'm just adding that everywhere that you can see the warmth of the jelly, which is almost all over the tart now it's time to go back in with that red. But the problem with the red is you can't doesn't get more concentrated. You have to de saturate it or else we'll be way too saturated in the shadows. So what I did is that we know that read has a complement of green. Since we don't have just a green, I added a little bit of blue and a little bit of yellow to make green. So specifically, I added cool, blue and cool yellow to make green and that slightly de saturated are red so that we can have shadows that air not so screaming because shadows are normally darker and de saturated . I'm putting that in anywhere. That's a shadow, and I'm also putting that around all of the little plants of masking fluid because all of those little seeds are in shadow, actually, so that's going to make it look more realistic and, like they're actually seeds and not lift little dots on top of the strawberry. Some areas are a little darker than other areas don't just make a circle around the seeds, actually looked at the picture and notice how the shadow changes depending on where it is on the strawberry, I'm adding the same shadow color in some of the crevices underneath the strawberries behind the strawberries. Don't be afraid to get dark. The bright parts of your painting won't shine if you don't have dark parts, too. I'm also defining those far away strawberries, giving them a little bit more formed. Okay, there's a little hollow there that's really dark and reading a little bit more pain fares. Well, now I'm going back to that same exact mixture that I used before for the blueberries and laying it again, going back into the dark areas and noticing anything that needs to be darker than it was before. By now, I'm using a smaller brush because the areas are more detailed and I can't use that large size rush that I was using before. Really, at this point, painting is all about layering these colors on top of one another until you get the kind of shape and darkness that you need. Be really careful with these blueberries about getting the right kind of shine because they're really shiny. And if you just paint them like a ball or paint them in all of one color, it won't look realistic. The shapes are kind of strange, but don't worry about that. Just paint what you see. The shapes don't have to make any kind of sense. They might be squiggly lines or all belong. It doesn't matter. Believe your eyes. Okay, I'm using a mixture of the deep purple for the blueberries on the right and the raspberries red for that top little blueberry. And I'm also using that mixture again to go in all of those crevices and make them just a little darker, but only putting them in the darkest, darkest areas of the raspberries. Not all over, like no going back in and adding red. Remember to add, read into the area where the jelly isas well, because you can see the strawberry through the deli. It's a better idea to add the red in layers like this, because you can also get the right shapes. Notice that I'm not just putting it everywhere, but in specific places for the strawberries in the back. I let the area a little bit first and then waited for it to get to a satiny stage and drew lines to imitate that What the inside of a strawberry looks like. It gets nice and feathered out that way, going back to that tarp and making it much darker. You can see I drew a line, and going into those crevices in the very bottom of the crust, again added some more of that to the shadows and also to the shadow underneath, just to bring that color in there. Now I noticed that there's a lot of the red reflection in the strawberries, so I took a bit of the red that I already use when the strawberries and added it to the purple that I used for the barriers to make this sort of readier reflection and then painting that in on some of the edges of the Berries because that's where you can see that reflection. There's a lot of reflections going on in this tart, especially on the bottom of these two Berries. Here. It's a lot of readiness. Okay, now, using that same color to feel in around that raspberry, it's a very purple e deep red sort of color and since we've already put in the darkest parts, we can kind of layer this color all over, most of it of letting some highlights. Now I just kind of dropped in some of that yellow that I've been using for the jelly. And because it's a little fun, you can have fun where you're painting. I also drop in a little bit more dark and cooler colors on the right hand side, darkening up that raspberry just a teensy bit more, using some of the really dark purple from the blueberries. Also using some of that purple that we had mixed up before for the Sperry and making sure everything is pretty defined. - Running a little bit of the dark color, it's a little browner. I was looking at my split pilot color chart, and I planted to the color of that is made from warm red and cool blue. So little purple dark color and I added some of the strawberry red to it, and I'm playing that into the shadows because we want something really dark that would really help ground the painting and not make it look like everything is just floating. Going into all of those little crevices. Remember that the shadows go over the crust. The shadows go on to other objects in addition to a lot of light. There's a lot of shadow in this painting going back into those blueberries. Darkening cannot be, the more they have to be really dive by the end of it. Now I'm mixing off just a bit of a cool red because, like I said before the strawberries on the right hand side or a bit cooler than the ones on the left hand side. So this is basically just a diluted cool red with a teensy bit warm red in it. Mostly cool, and I'm adding that anywhere where it seems it's a little bit cool, you can see that it was pretty easy to cool down that red now going back in with the warm red again on some of the other strawberries and back to those blueberries with the same dark colors, darkening them up, avoiding the highlights. Now we're really just trying to punch up that color for the same strawberry red, but just really go in there. It doesn't have to be a very opaque clear, but we're trying to get those colors to the same vibrancy that you're seeing in the painting. Don't just paint it everywhere. Make sure to leave your highlights, but try to just get that color in there. I'm doing the same thing with the blueberries, just really trying to get those darks dark. Most of the form is already there, so we just have to follow what we already have. I'm just using the same colors that we mix up before and layering it on top. This part is kind of fun because you don't really have to worry too much. You've done a lot of the work already. Now you just kind of get to splash paint around. I think like I want those strawberries just a bit redder. So I'm going back in again with the same mixture of cool, red and warm red and putting that everywhere. Now we're mixing a little bit of that dark purple into that, the same purple we used for the blueberries and adding those de saturated areas again just to make sure that it doesn't get to saturated Poppy. Brian, I'm also layering between the objects, so you see me adding that into the blueberries because There's not a super distinct line between any of the things the blueberries kind of blended with strawberries. The strawberries kind of blend into the blueberries, so I'm kind of overlapping the colors as well. I obviously wanted to make it a little bit more gold, and I love that feeling of the gel yellow with a tart. So I just deepen that up a bit and made sure I got that dribble that's going down over the crust. I also took this in color and deepened up the shadows in the crust. Because everything else is so much darker now, it's easy to see what it needs to be dark. And finally, I'm taking off the masking fluid with an eraser. Can you see how bright and light that is? I use a brush to brush it away because you shouldn't use your hands. The oils of your hands can harm the paper and make it difficult to paint. Now I'm just using a flat brush to soften those edges, because otherwise it will just look like the cut out. And I'm just dabbing away with a little bit of tissue so that everything can look a little bit more realistic. Your job isn't done when you just take off masking fluid. You remember those strawberries air kind of a green, So I'm mixing up a light green using cool yellow and cool blue. I dilute that ally, and then I put that in all of those little dots. Once that's dry, I go back in again, and I also paint around them with that de saturated red mixture. Teoh, make sure that those shadows are really making those seats sit deep inside the strawberry like they should be. And that's it. You just painted a tire. Did you like it? I hope so. I did let us see the tart or whatever you painted in the class project. 17. Wrap up: now I should have learned everything you need to know to get you on the path toe. Awesome letter color mixing. Let's just recap. It's important to know how to read a watercolor tuber pen, because knowing your pigments makes mixing a lot easier. It's watching is kind of like speed dating, and it lets you get to know all the colors in your palette really quickly. Even if you don't make any of the other charts, please try to make the appellate charts so that you can know all of the mixing options that are available. Teoh. If you're a bus, make a tonal mixing chart in a watercolor spectrum chart. This will really expand the range of colors that you can mix, tweak, dilute and do anything you can imagine to use a color, isolating tool or graphic software to identify colors and then finally put all that knowledge together to make a beautiful painting 18. Thank You!: Thank you so much for enrolling in this course. I hope that you learned a lot and you feel much more confident about mixing what occurred on your own. I can't wait to see your painting. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask. Thank you again and look out for my next course on watercolor painting. I