Watercolor Mixing for Beginners

1. 1.1 Introduction: Hi everyone. Welcome to Watercolor Mixing for Beginners. My name is Diane. I've been teaching art for 12 years and making art my whole life, and I love it, and I hope to inspire you to love it with me. Today, we're going to be making a color-wheel using watercolor. You're going to learn today how to mix watercolors. We're going to learn how to mix our primary colors. From those primary colors, we're going to make secondary colors, tertiary colors, and complimentary colors. We'll go into what all that is during the class. You're going to learn how to control the intensity of your colors. You're going to learn how to judge how much color to mix. You're going to learn how to paint an even surface in watercolor, just a very simple little small square. You're going to learn how to match colors very accurately. This class is designed for people who have never or very rarely painted or mixed with water color, who have experienced frustration with watercolor, if you'd like some tools to get out of that. It is not a class design for people who have lots of experience with watercolor and would like more of a challenge. I hope you enjoy it. 2. 1.2 Prep: To prepare for this course, you're going to need to download and print out the finished watercolor wheel, which looks just like this. It's going to have all your colors already painted in, and the reason you need this is so you can match the colors you're mixing to something, keep in mind all printers are different, so your colors may come out a little bit different than mine, the point is to just be able to fairly accurately match the color mixing with a visual reference that's approximately like this, so that's totally fine if it's not exactly the same. You're also going to need a blank version of this wheel, which you're going to be painting in. It's important to have your blank wheel on a piece of cold press watercolor paper with the textured side up, so that's side you want the wheel printed on, one side is just a little smoother than the other and you can just feel that with your hands. Most printers have water-soluble ink in them, which means if you put water or watercolor or anything wet on it, it will bleed, so for your convenience, we have a watercolor wheel downloadable, that's a very light version, you can print that out and you can trace over it with a sharpie marker or permanent marker, and that way when you put your paint on it won't bleed. If you happen to have permanent printer ink, then you can just go ahead and print it right from your printer onto watercolor paper. Hundred and forty pound is the best weight for this class of paper, you'll see watercolor papers come in different weights, so 140 pound is standard and it's a good way if you want to go a little heavier, you can keep in mind, the heavier your paper, the more difficult it will be to feed into your printer, however. So that's entirely up to you. Let's get started. 3. 1.3 Mindset: Some things that are really good to know before you start this course are that you want to stay on track and try to follow me as much as you can. Feel free to pause it if you want at anytime. You can also watch ahead a little bit and then go back and do a color with me if you prefer to do it that way. But our goal is to learn how to really properly mix colors in watercolor and eliminate frustration, eliminate colors running out on you, things like that. If you follow along with me, hopefully you'll have that experience. We're going to mix a lot of the primary colors because most everything we're mixing here is going to be just using the primary colors, red, yellow, and blue, although you may see a couple other colors thrown in now and then. But we're going to just make large parts of those three in the beginning of the class. You will notice during the class that your water will start to get muddy, and cloudy, and dirty. Your spongy or towel may experience the same thing. When that happens, just go to the sink, rinse it out, get fresh water. You can rinse and squeeze your sponge, you can get a fresh towel or just flip your towel. Just keep those things relatively clean throughout the class and you'll have a better, less frustrating experience. Also, feel free to stop anytime you want during the class. You can always come back to it later and your colors will reinvigorate if you add a little bit of water to them. If they happen to dry out over a day or a week or a month or however long you want to take a break from it, just add a little bit of water and they're back to their original vibrance. I'm going to be talking a lot about some terms in color theory. One is value. Value is just how light or dark a color is. The more water your color has, the lighter the value. The more color it has, the darker the value. You'll be seeing that as we go. Then the other term you might hear is saturation, which is just referring to the intensity of the color. For example, the colors on the outside ring are very intense. They're very saturated. As you move in, they become less and less saturated as you get closer to gray. That's it. Let's get to it. 4. 1.4 Materials: So now we're going to talk about all the materials you need for this class. First, you need a watercolor mixing tray, one with different size pots is best. But if you happen to have one with just small pots like this, that's also fine. You're going to need a set of watercolor paints, something like this 10-12 colors is best. You want to have enough colors so that you have a little bit of variety, but not so many that you're just squeezing out of the tube and mixing directly from the tube. In my opinion, colors directly from the tube usually looked pretty canned. So it's nice to usually mix your colors, at least with two or three more colors besides just the main one. This will allow you to do that. You are going to need some strips of watercolor paper. These are just for testing your colors and they don't necessarily have to be strips. You can just have a scrap of paper to it. This is easier if you have a little strip. You will need a brush. Get one that's about this size. I like to compare it to my pinky finger. It's about half the width of my pinky finger. Everybody thinks these are different. So you can look at your own pinky. But this is about a size eight watercolor brush. Often the number is written right on the top of the handle. This one doesn't happen to have that, but that's approximately the size and it's a round watercolor brush. So you can see it kind of tapers up to a fine point there. You'll need an old towel or a sponge for soaking up extra water and you'll need your watercolor wheel printed or traced onto a piece of cold press watercolor paper. About 140 pound is fine, but if you have a different pounded or weight, that's also fine. So a note about printing these, if you send watercolor paper through your printer, chances are your printer ink is water-soluble, which means if you put water color on it, it's going to bleed the ink. So I recommend printing out the very light version of the watercolor wheel, which you'll find on the downloads page, and tracing over it with a permanent marker. Alternately, you can print this out onto a piece of regular paper, tape it to a sheet of cold press watercolor paper and trace your printout onto the cold press watercolor paper with a permanent marker by holding it up to a window or a light table. If you happen to have one. You're also going to need the printout of the finished color wheel so that you can compare your mixed colors to these. You're going to need a jar of water. Optional items are a pitcher of water, and this is just so you can pour the water into your little pots. It goes a little bit faster than using the brush to deliver the water from the jar and you can have a hairdryer. You don't need to have one for the occasion when you're trying to paint two squares right next to each other. If one happens to be wet and you try to paint another one right next to it, they'll tend to bleed together. So it's good to blow dry it first, or you can just alternately let it air dry and come back to it when it dry. 5. 1.5 Techniques Part 1: We're just going to talk about some of the techniques you need for this class. The first one, is filling up one of your mixing trays with water and mixing paints. There's two ways to do that. You can either dip and scrape your brush from the water into the cup, and you can see this actually goes pretty quickly. This is preferred method for me because I can really control how much water goes in. If you prefer, you can have a little pinch of water nearby and pour your water, but that's less controlled. I just filled it up all the way, which you don't really want to do because it tends to overflow. If that happens, you can just soak up a little bit with your towel or your sponge and that's fine too. Another technique we're going to do, is getting rid of color if you happen to have too much. That's one way to do it, is just soaking it up with your towel. If you don't want to get your towel really dirty very quickly and you're trying to get rid of a color, you can just take a brush full of color and rinse it out into your water cup. Always touch your towel or your sponge before going back in because otherwise you're going to be adding water to it and that will lighten your color. I'm rinsing it out in the water, touching the towel to get rid of extra water, going back and getting more. You want to do this if you find that you're mixing and mixing and you have too much color and it's taking you a long time to mix your color, you don't need to have that much, so you can always just get rid of some. Another technique we're going to use, is how to test your color. To do that, just get a nice big brush full of color and just scrape off any excess. You want to have enough on the brush to where it tests well. You don't want to scrape like crazy like that unless you don't have enough color left, in which case it's usually fine to do that. But for the sake of having enough color, just scrap once, put one stripe on, rinse, touch your towel or your sponge to make sure you don't have any extra water, and then just touch that drip on the bottom. I'm touching it multiple times because it's all along the whole bottom edge of the color. What you don't want to do, is wipe it off because you can see that lightens the color. Something else you don't want to do is test multiple times in the same place. Don't do that because it will make your color usually appear darker than it really is. To recap what you want to do with a clean brush or if you are just mixing, you can do it from here. Scrape once, test once, rinse, touch your towel, touch your drip once, and you can tilt the strip to make it go to one side. If you happen to have extra drip, you can touch your towel and touch the drip again. Just don't wipe it. Another technique we're going to be using i, s painting in the color into your color wheel. To do that, just grab your color, big brush full and paint it. You can start anywhere you want. It's helpful to point your brush towards the edge, that way you can keep a really sharp edge, and hold your brush pretty close to this metal part of the brush, which is called the feral. If you're comfortable further back, that's fine. You don't want to be away back here because the further back you are, the harder it is to control where your paint goes. It's best to have your brush pointed towards the edge that you're painting. You can rotate it if you need to, to make it a little easier to get into the edges or maybe it's fine for you not to do that. Either way is fine. Whatever is most comfortable. Once you got the color in there, you're going to rinse your brush, touch your towel to get all the water out, and then pick up your paper and tilt it to one side so that all the excess color falls to one corner. Then just touch that drip just the same way we did on the test strip. If you need to, you can touch your towel again and touch your drip again if there's more drip than the brush can handle. 6. 1.6 Techniques Part 2: Now, I'm going to show you how to paint in the colors into the color wheel, and we're going to do two samples. One, if you paint a wet color next to a wet color, which is not what we want to do, I just want you to see what happens if we do that, and then the other one is where we blow dry between colors. We're going to start with yellow. You want to get a lot of paint on your brush and hold the brush fairly close to the middle part so you can control really well where the paint goes and just fill in that rectangle, and then you can tilt the paper. I'm going to scrape that so I don't take all the color. The drip falls to one corner. Rinse your brush, touch your towel or sponge, and just touch that extra drip. Then we're going to go back and do the same thing over here. For some, it's easier if you turn your paper so that you're always pointing towards the edge. Feel free to do that anytime you want. Get more paint if it feels like it's drying out. You want to be painting pretty wet. Then I'm going to rinse, touch the towel, tilt and soak up the drip. Now, for the sake of showing you what happens if you happen to go in and paint next to a color that's already wet, we're going to put the blue in right next to the yellow. You can see they just really bleed together, which is very pretty, but that's not our goal for this class. We want to try to keep the colors very separate. I'm going to tilt so I can soak up the drip. You can see what happens if we blow dry, which is what we actually want to do, or we want the color to be very dry, whether you blow dry or just wait for it to natural dry, either way is fine. I'm going to blow dry it. You want to hover about six inches above your paper and just turn your drier on. Then when you're sure it's dry, one way to test that is to use the back of your hand and just dab out it. If it feels warm and dry, you're good. The reason you want to use the back your hand instead of the front is because the front can leave fingerprints, the back is the least invasive. Once you're sure it's warm and dry, then you can paint in your next color and they won't bleed together. They stay very separate. Tilt that up and soak up the drip. The last thing I wanted to show you was how to clean out a cup, and you would do this if you needed more more cups, if you used them all up. If you want to just take it to the sink and rinse the whole thing, you can certainly do that, but if you want to just get rid of one color, just soak up the color, rinse it, touch, just like you're getting rid of excess color like we talked about earlier, but this time you're getting rid of all of it. Rinse it out, touch, and you can just wipe your pan out. You could alternately just take your towel and soak all of it up if you don't mind your towel getting dirty. Then if I was going to make something similar to the color I just got rid off, that would be adequate, but if I wanted to make something completely different, I would want to clean around the edge too just to make sure that none of that residual old color gets into my new color, and just really give it a good once-over and you can finish off by wiping it out with your towel or your sponge. 7. 2.1 Intro - Primary Colors: Now we're going to start by mixing our primary colors. You probably have heard of primary colors. You know what they are, yellow, red, and blue. They're called primary because they're the strongest colors in nature, and they're also impossible to mix using other means, they just exist the way they are. But they're strong because you can use them to mix every other color there is. We're going to start with yellow, since it's the lightest, and then we're going to go on to red and blue. We start with the lightest color and water color because we want to keep our water as clean as possible. That way you don't have to keep changing it all the time. 8. 2.2 Yellow: Now we're going to mix yellow. We're going to start with yellow because it's the lightest color. You want to generally mix from light to dark because your water will get increasingly muddy with the darker colors. You just have to change it less often if you start from light and go to dark. On that note as we're mixing, if you notice your color getting darker, muddy, go ahead and just change it as often as you want. If you're mixing a really dark color like this guy over here, that will almost never matter, if you have muddy water. But if you're mixing yellows, or light greens, or oranges, or lovely lights like that, you want to have clear water. There's two ways you can get the water into your cup. One is to dip and scrape with your brush, and this way goes pretty quickly. That's one way to do it. The other way is to pour, and this will probably be the greater temptation. But often you end up pouring too much like I just did, so if you do, if it feels like it's going to overflow a little bit, just soak them up with your towel or your sponge. You want about three quarters full, not completely to the top because it'll just tend to fall everywhere. If you're mixing a lot of a color, you want to use the pitcher generally like if you were going to fill one of these up and paint the sky of a larger painting, you can pour. If you're painting a smaller area like any of these, is perfectly fine to use one of these smaller cups and just use the dip and scrape method. You always want to have a little bit more color than you think you want so that you don't run out of your paint. But you don't want to overdo it because the more water you have, the more paint you need to use, the more of your time you use mixing, and you will definitely gain a sense for that as we're going. For right now, you can just take my word for it. We want about three-quarters of one of these small cups and we're going to add some color. I have two yellows in this kit. I have lemon yellow and medium yellow. I'm going to use the medium yellow because the lemon yellow, as lovely as it is, does not get bright or saturated enough. If you remember the word saturation from the previous video on things to know before picking up the brush, that means how intense your color gets. You're going to squeeze from the bottom just like toothpaste and squeeze some into the paint. I'm squeezing about half an inch and just leave it open because you're probably going to need more. Then you can just manipulate it with your brush, push at it and stir it around until it's completely mixed into the water. Isn't that lovely? Look how bright. One thing about watercolor is, it is deceptive. It looks brighter than it is in the cup than it actually is on your paper. That's why we have these test strips so that you can find out what your color looks like before you commit it to your painting, or in this case, you have color wheel. I'm really stirring it up and looking at my brush to make sure there's no lumps. There's a lump right there, so I'm just going to stir it up a little bit more, twist it around to get the lumps off. Then there's no lumps in it, it doesn't feel like there's any lumps at the bottom. Now, I'm going to scrape my brush, which is important so that you don't take a brush full of color with you. If you don't scrape it and if you just keep on mixing and testing, you end up losing all your color. Do scrape once, and then put a stripe on your test strip, and that is pretty bright. But you can see there's a big drip right there which deceives you into thinking you're colors brighter if you happen to have it flat like that. You want to tilt it to one side, rinse out your brush, touch your towel so you just roll the brush on the towel or the sponge to soak up extra water, and then touch that drip. That is your true color. A few mistakes that are common here are doing this. You get a bunch of paint on your brush and you brush over and over again. Don't do that because it will also deceive you into thinking your color is darker than it really is, or more saturated. You just want to scrape once, test once, touch your drip once. Another common mistake is wiping the drip off and you can see if I wipe it off, that makes the color look a lot lighter than it really is. So you don't want to do that either. You just want to barely touch it with the tip of a dry brush and the drip will just soak up into the brush and leave you with your true color. Now that we have that color, I'm going to hold it up to my yellow over here and it could be a little bit brighter, more saturated. I'm going to add a little bit more yellow to it, about half as much as what I poured before and mix that in really well. I had said earlier that you generally want to mix two or more colors together in order to avoid the canned color look, that does not usually apply to primary colors because primary colors, as you probably remember from the video on what primary colors are, they can't be mixed using two other colors. They just exist the way they are. That's the exception to that rule about not painting straight from the tube. There's really no drip there to soak up. I still feel like it could be a little bit more saturated. I'm going to squeeze some more in. After we paint this in, you'll notice you have a lot of yellow left. You may be wondering why I had you mix so much and it's because you're going to be using this yellow to mix a few of the other colors on the wheel. I wanted you to have enough. If for some reason you run out, you can always mix more, so it's perfectly fine. I'm going to scrape and test. I'm feeling pretty good about that one. Now we can paint it in. To paint, just dip your brush in the color, get a nice big brush full in, and you can just start on an edge. We'll use the tip of your brush, angle it towards the edge of the shape and just brush the color and make sure you have a lot of paint. You want this to be pretty drippy so that it goes on evenly and you don't end up with brushstrokes. If you paint to dry it, you often have brushstrokes. Then if you angle your head and look at in the light, you can see if there's some surface tension in the water. If there is, you can tilt your board a little bit to force all the water to fall to one side and touch your drip on one corner. Same principle as we did with the test strip, just to get rid of any extra color. 9. 2.3 Red: Now we're going to move onto the second primary color which is red. Again, just do the dip and scrape thing or you can pour. I'm going to dip and scrape because I prefer it and just to be able to control how much water and getting more, and got it just about full. Now I'm going to touch my towel to get the extra water off, and we have two reds in this kit, brilliant red and crimson. Crimson is more of a blood red, brilliant red is more of a bright tomato red. I'm going to use the brilliant one and squeeze out about the same amount as I did yellow about half an inch and I guess I got a little more in there and just keep it off to the sides. I'm pretty sure you need to mix more and stir that up really well, a big lump in the bottom. You can see my red starting to leak into my yellow there. I did overfill the red a little bit and I'm going to just take my towel and wipe that off because not that I really care if it gets on the plastic, but what I don't want is for the red to fall into the yellow. Actually, now that I say that, I'm going to be mixing orange with that yellow in a minute, I guess it doesn't matter if I happened to get red in there either. In principle though, you want to try to keep your colors contained so that they don't contaminate one another. Mixing that up, will get my brush no lumps. I don't feel any lumps at the bottom of the cup. I'm going to scrape and test and that looks pretty bright. There's really not much drip to soak up, but I'm going to hold it up to the wheel and see how that compares and that actually works out pretty well. I'm going to paint it in. I know I've said this before but if you need more time to mix, feel free to pause the video any all time you want and you can just resume whenever you're ready. Then we'll just paint it in using that nice point on the brush to try to keep the color contained within the circle. It's also helpful if you hold the brush very close to the metal part of the brush, but that way you can really control where the color goes if you're holding it back here, you have much less control. I'm going to rinse, wipe my brush on my towel, and tilt my board a little bit, see if there's any major drips. Little bits coming down to the corner. I'm going to just touch it to soak that up and we're done with red. 10. 2.4 Blue: Now we're going to mix blue and you can see my water is pinkish from the red. That's completely fine because blue is such a powerful, strong color. It's not going to be affected by that. I forgot to rinse my brush out. Well, I had some red color in my brush, but again, the blue is so strong that that won't make a difference. If you're ever mixing and you notice that your water is making a difference in your color, that's definitely when you would want to change it. But this is meant to give you a sense for when it's okay to not change it. In my kit, I have two blues, I have phthalo and ultramarine. Ultramarine is a [inaudible] blue, phthalo is a little bit on the greenish side, but it's also the stronger of the two. I'm going to use phthalo as my main blue and I'm going to squeeze out about little more than half inch like I did the last two times and mix that up, get rid of the lump. I'm turning my rush in the bottom and also just jabbing at the bottom. You don't feel anymore lumps. I've definitely got lumps on my brush and I'm going to keep mixing until those are gone. Still lumps on my brush. Yeah. It's harder to see because I've dark bristles and a dark color. Okay, now they're gone. I'm going to scrape and test once and that's very pretty, but it doesn't look like it is dark enough in value. Let's check it out. It's a little bit light, so I'm going to add some more. It's so fun to make pretty colors. Wow, that got a lot darker, although I do have a big drip there that I need to get rid of. Soak up that drip. That did seem to make a big difference and I think I got it. I'm going to paint in the blue now, get a big brush full of color. Go over to the blue section and paint that in and just get all that area nice and covered up. Feel free to turn your board if it's more comfortable for you to get into certain corners or next to certain edges. I'm going to rinse, touch the towel to get all the extra water out and tilt the board a little bit, yeah. There's a significant amount of extra colors, so I'm going to soak that up and we're done with blue and we're done with the primary colors. 11. 3.1 Intro - Secondary Colors: Now that you're done with primary colors, we're going to mix our secondary colors. Secondary colors are always a mix of two primaries. Orange for example, is a mix of yellow and red and if you ever don't know how to mix a secondary color just locate it on your color wheel and find the two nearest primaries and that's like a calculator. That's how you mix your secondary. Green would be yellow and blue. Purple is red and blue. You're always going to start with the lighter color and add the darker one. For purple, we'll start with red and not blue. For orange we'll start with yellow and not red. For green we'll start with yellow and not blue. The reason for that is you want to have the color that you need the most of first, so that you're adding just a little bit of the other color to alter it. If you go the other way around and start with a darker color, you have to add a lot of the lighter color in order to make the color you want. 12. 3.2 Orange: Now we're going to mix orange and even if you happen to have an orange in your kit, I don't happen to have one, but if you do, ignore it. For the sake of learning how to mix colors, we're going to mix all of our secondary colors, orange, green and purple, using our primary colors, red, yellow and blue. So that you kind of get a sense of how to mix more than one color together and the new ones you can get from that experience. You have a couple of choices. You can either add red from the previously mixed red to the yellow, or you could squeeze some red out into a clean part of your palette and scoop it in, or you could squeeze it directly into the yellow. Red is much stronger than yellow, so in this case, I'm just going to use a little bit of red from the previously mixed one and add it. That's a dirty brush. Oh, by the way, have clean water please, because we just mixed blue. If your water looked like mine, that's not good. We need clean water. I'm just going to mix that little bit of blue in because it wasn't very much and as you can see, it didn't affect my color. So I'm just going to take a little bit of red in at a time. I can always add more, but you can't take it out once you put it in. So it's a good idea to add very conservatively. That being said, if you do accidentally add too much, it's no big deal. You can always add more yellow. You can see I got kind of a nice light yellowy orange out of that. I'm just going to add a little bit more red. Scraping, rinsing, touching the towel, and getting a little bit more red and adding it in. A reason you may want to add color from the tube is if you happen to have a very light red and you don't want to just add pink to your yellow. But since we've just mixed three very saturated bright colors, you don't have that problem. That to me looks like a really good strong orange. So I'm going to test it, scrape, test. I'm going to tilt the test strip a little bit so the drip falls and hold it up to my orange. It actually looks more like I achieved my yellow orange there than my regular orange. So I'm going to add a little bit more red to it. By doing this, you can see I'm depleting my red a little bit, so I may have to mix more red later, which is also totally fine. You will find with water color, as you mix, you'll gain a sense for how much color to mix. But sometimes, you'll run out anyway, and that's just part of it. It's fun. So I'm a little closer, I'm almost there. I'm going to add just a little bit more red and then tilt it and touch the drip and there, I got it. Now I'm going to paint it in. As you can see, the orange is still not anywhere near the other three, so I don't have to worry about blow drying. I'm just going to paint it in, getting the tip of that brush right up next to the line. So in the center, you can see I'm being a little bit more careless because there's no edges to be concerned with and when I get to the edges, I'm going very carefully and slowly. Rinse, touch the towel, soak up all the extra water, and then tilt the board so the drip falls to one corner and soak that up. I'm touching it multiple times to get lots of drip. If you ever have a drip so big that just one touch doesn't do it, or several touches like I just did, you can just touch your towel again and go back and get a little bit more. 13. 3.3 Green: So now we're going to mix green and as you can see, I used up my yellow by mixing orange. So I need to mix a new yellow and then we're going to add some blue to it. I'm going to dip and scrape into a part right next to the blue, and you can see my blue is threatening to fall into it. But since I'm going to be adding blue to this color anyway, I'm not concerned about that. One thing I did not mention with the orange is that when you're mixing two colors or three colors or whatever together, you generally start with a weaker color and add the stronger. Because if you start with the stronger, you have to fight against it to add enough weak color in order to make the change you need. Yellow is weaker than blue, it's lighter, it's less strong so we're going to start with yellow. I'm just going to do the same thing I did the first time with the medium yellow, squeezing them good amount half an inch. Mix it up. I can see my water's a little dirty, but we are mixing a darker color so it really won't matter. Twisting my brush so I can see there's a lot a yellow clumps left on it. I'm just going to see how strong my yellow is. It doesn't have to match the color wheel exactly since I'm going to be mixing green from it, not trying to match yellow. I just want to make sure it's saturated enough so that when I add the blue, it will show up nice and strong as green. I do feel like it's a little bit weak, so I'm going to add some more yellow, and that's just a judgment call. It's difficult to describe when a color is too weak or too strong. It's just something you have to gain a sense for it by practicing, by mixing the color. I'm going to stir that up really well, scrape and test, rinse, touch, soak up that trip and that's looking stronger to me now. I'm feeling good about that. I'm going to add the blue. I'm going to start by just taking a little bit off to the side and mixing it. You can see already there's a green swirl. It's very strong compared to yellow. You don't need a lot of blue to make green. I made a nice light yellow green. I'm going to rinse touch again. Another reason you touch your towel before dipping into the color is because if you don't, if you go straight from here to here, you're adding water, which means you're making your color lighter. You always want to go into your color pots with no water on your brush, unless you're actively trying to make your color lighter or add more volume to the color by adding water. That made a nice green, let's test it and see how close I came to the color wheel. Touch this towel, soak it up. Pretty good, but it's a little on the yellow side. I'm going to add a little bit more in blue. Almost out of room on this test strip. There we go. Now I think I got it. So touch the towel. Get some green nice big brush full and paint that one in. You'll see here that the color goes on unevenly sometimes and I'm just dabbling at it and that's okay to do as long as you have a lot of paint there. If you don't have a lot of paint, if you're dabbing at it, you'll see that you just leave little toasty brushstrokes everywhere. You're constantly fighting them. But that's also the nature of watercolor. It goes on unevenly and cold press watercolor paper which has a texture to it, which is what we're using here, will naturally dry a little bit uneven. That's just part of the art. You want to learn to expect that and embrace it, because it's beautiful. So soaking up that trip and we're done with green. 14. 3.4 purple: Now, we're going to mix our last secondary color, which is purple. We already have a red mixed up, so we can just add a little bit of blue to it the same way we added blue to the yellow to make green. I feel like that might even be too much. I'm just going to excrete most of that off. Mix a little bit of blue in with your red. It definitely darkened it quite a bit, but it is not purple. More of a reddish purple. So scraping that off really well because I'm kind of low on red, and I want to make sure I'm not taking too much out of the pot with me when I go to rinse my brush. Get all the extra water off on the towel and get a little bit more blue. Mix that up. When you're dealing with a color that's as strong as blue, it's a good idea to just kind of rein it in and have a lot of patience, even though you may be tempted to add big brushfuls. It'll save you some work in the end if you add a little bit at a time and just kind of watch it gradually change. Getting darker. Let's check it out. I'm not convinced that it's there yet. It still looks pretty reddish, but I just want to see what it looks like on the test strip.That was not a big enough brushful.I'm going to scrape, test. There we go. A good brushful, a good test, has a little bit of a drip left on it, and that way you get a really true sense of the color. So let's hold it up.I made red-purple, so I'm going to add a little bit more blue to get to the truer purple. It almost looks like brown or black in the pot,but let's see what it looks like on the test strip. Tilt it. Soak up the drip. Got it. Okay.Now, we can paint that one in. Lots of paint, so that it has an opportunity to spread around and make an even color. Going to dot a little bit more into this corner. Then rinse, touch my towel, tilt the board and just touch that drip with the tip of my brush to soak it up. We're done with the secondaries. 15. 4.1 Intro - Tertiary Colors: Now that we're done mixing the secondary colors, we're going to move on to tertiaries. Tertiary colors are always a mix of one primary and one secondary. For example, yellow, orange, if you find another color wheel, is a mix of yellow, a primary color, and orange, the secondary color. All six of them are mixes of exactly that. Just like the secondary color. If you ever don't know how to mix one, just locate your tertiary color on the color wheel, blue, purple. It's a mix of blue and purple. It's also given away easily by the name blue-green is a mix of blue and green. Just like secondary colors, we're going to start with a lighter color and add the darker one. You can, at this point in the mixing, use colors that you've already mixed and just add to them as you'll see as we go through the tertiaries and the compliments. 16. 4.2 Yellow-Orange: Now we're going to move on to tertiary colors and the first one we're going to do is yellow, orange because it's one of the lightest ones. As you can see, we don't have yellow anymore. We're going to start by mixing a yellow again. You can dip and scrape or you can pour your water into a new pot, pan, cup. Not sure what they call these things, [inaudible] it, little thingies that you mix color in a little bit more. Again I'm going to get the medium yellow makes it nice, strong yellow. Stir it up all the way, get rid of all the lumps. We already have an orange over there that we can use to add to this. At this point, since you've had experience mixing two colors together, not straight from the tube, for example, we mixed orange using yellow and red. Instead of squeezing an orange from the tube, you could take a little bit of orange from a tube and squeeze it, if you prefer that, just keep in mind that orange is a lot stronger than yellow, so you need very little or you can go this round and a little quicker since you already have an orange mixed up and just grab a little bit. I'm going to just dipping the brush in and getting a drip on the tip of the brush. You feel like that might even be a little much so I touched it on the side, mix that in. You can see that it really changes it very quickly. Not enough but we can go back and get more touch and get some more orange, I'm going to do that again. That looks pretty good. I'm going to give it a quick test and see what we've got. Scrape, test, tilts, so I get my drip falling off the side. It's still too yellow. We'll add more orange to it. This time I'm going in for a little bit more because I have a sense now of how much it changes it. I'll get one more. Rinse again, touch before you deep in so that you're not adding water to your colors. Mix it all up, scrape, test, and touch the trip. By the way, you'll you'll notice that I just touched the drip and touch my towel directly without rinsing, which is also fine to do. Your towel just gets a little bit dirtier quicker. If you want to clean your towel, you can rinse and then touch, but that's entirely up to you. You can still go a little bit more orange. I'm getting a little more aggressive with how much I'm adding because the color I'm mixing is darker than it was when I started, which means it can tolerate more of the orange color without changing as rapidly. Touch the sponge, touch the drip, getting closer here. I think I got it. Note here because we just painted our secondary, just look at your colors that you've already painted in from the side. If they look even a little bit shiny, blow dry them before you paint this in because this is now touching both of those. You don't want it to be even the least bit wet. If it doesn't look shiny at all, then do the hand test, touch it with the back of your hand and just make sure it's totally dry. I've blow dried this between our last colors, so mine is dry. If yours is not, go ahead and shut off the film right now, pause it, and blow dry. I'm going to grab a big brush with color and brush it in. Push it around a little bit to try to get it a little bit more even. Rinse, touch the towel, and tilt the board to one side to the drip all falls and [inaudible]. We're done with yellow, orange. 17. 4.3 Yellow-Green: Now we're going to make the yellow green. Again, we need to make the yellow first. I have a little bit of an orangey water, but that's okay because we're mixing a darker color, so the orangey part will not show. I'm going to make slightly less this time because as you can see, we have just a ton of the yellow-orange leftover, which isn't necessary. Start again with yellow. Mix that up really well. Then we have that nice green already mixed up which we can add to the yellow. No, there's a lump. Get rid of all the lumps. Rinse, touch the towel, get a little bit of green, mix that in. So pretty just like spring time. A test on the strip, rinse, touch the towel, soak up the drip. I'm guessing, yeah, I could use a little bit more green. It's just a little bit too limey. Now that looks exactly the same. Let me try that again. That looks a little better and I'm happy with that, so we'll paint that one in, big brushful. Again, just make sure your green and yellow are totally dry. If you've just blow dried for the yellow-orange though, your whole wheel should be completely dry. All of these tertiaries will be completely fine to paint in. Rinse, touch, tilt the board, touch the drip, and then with that one. 18. 4.4 Blue-Green: Now we're going to move onto blue-green and we already have a green mixed up, and we have some blue. No water in the brush, I'm just going take some blue and mix it right into my green. Adding the darker color or the more dominant color to the lighter one as we usually do. I'm pretty sure that wasn't nearly enough. But we'll give it a shot. Yeah, that looks still just completely green. I'm going to add a bigger brush full of blue this time. Mix it in. That's looking better. Still more blue. Another bigger brush, full of blue. If you have less green than I do, you can add blue a little more cautiously, but because I have such a large amount I'm taking larger brush fulls. More and more blue. That's looking good. Probably not enough yet. No, but getting closer. Boy, the test strip starts to look really pretty after a while. Yeah, that looks exactly the same. So I'm just going to take another one. Keep going. Don't feel you have to test after every single brush fully there. Once you get a level of confidence about it, and you can see whether or not it's making the difference you want then you can add or tests every couple brushstrokes or whatever you feel inspired to do so. Let's see what that looks like. There we go. Now we get to paint. Right into the blue-green section. Went over. I'll add up all the way. Rinse, soak up the extra water, tilt as you can actually see the drip falling. That's cool. Wait patiently before we get to the bottom, and then dab at it to soak it up. Done with blue-green. 19. 4.5 Blue-Purple: Now we're going to mix up blue, purple. Even though blue and purple are both pretty dark colors, blue is the more dominant one. Remember, blue is part of purple, so we'll just add a little bit of blue to the purple to blue it up. Like the past tense of blow it up, but that's not what I meant. That shouldn't take too long because in my case, that's very blue. Maybe I went a little overboard. I think I did. That's to blue. Perfect, I'm glad that happened. Now we're going to add a little bit more red. I don't have a lot of color left, so rather than squeeze directly into there, even though red is a lighter color than purple. You can probably get away with squeezing it directly into the pot. I'm going to squeeze it on the side, so I can add it in more controlled amounts. The other thing is I do want a bluer color. I don't want to add too much red. Let's see what happen there. Wow, that's really dark. If I tilt it and get the drip out of the way. Let's check that out. That wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. I lucked out. I'm going to get a big brush full of blue, purple and paint that one in. It's helpful sometimes to rest the heel of your hand or the side of your hand on your paper to help with controlling the paint and where your brush goes. If you're hovering like this, it's a little bit more difficult. Touch, tilt. That is thick paint. The more concentrated the amount of paint in your water, it's a thicker goopier super it is. You can see it's taking a long time to fall. In fact, it's not really falling. I'm just going to leave that because there's no real drip coming to the bottom. It's just going to be a little bit blotchy, although when it dries, it'll dry more evenly. That's it for blue, purple. 20. 4.6 Red-Purple: Now we're going to mix red, purple. This may have already happened to you, but it's just happening to me where I am pretty much out of color. I don't have enough really to mix a good red purple. Rather than just try to add red to that, I'm going to add a little bit of extra water first. Even though I know that's going to make it lighter, I want to make sure I have enough color. I'm only going to fill it about halfway because we really don't need that much. I'm going to start with red, because red is the less dominant color and I happened to have a little bit leftover from there. You can always squeeze it out of the tube if you don't happen to have any left. Mix that up and then I'm going to add a little bit of blue. I don't really know if it's saturated enough, if the value is deep enough. But if it isn't, I can add red and more blue after I've done this. So I'm afraid I just overdid it on the blue and I was too excited about what I was talking about not paying attention. It's not only too blue, it's too light in value. So I'm going to start by adding more red and it's 6.5 dozen here. I guess I'll just squeeze it directly and I could put it on the side and scoop it in. I have a fairly good sense for how much I need to make it saturated enough, so I just put in about a quarter of an inch. If you feel like you don't need that much, you can squeeze it on the side and then scoop it in, or maybe you don't need any red at all. Maybe you already nailed it and I'm just catching up. So that's looking pretty reddish purple to me, but because the value was so light over here, I don't know if it's saturated enough. That's nice and saturated, and I think I got lucky and added about the right amount. Let's check. Yeah, I did. So I'm going to paint that in. You might have noticed by now that water color mixing is often a lot of back and forth. If you're mixing more than one color into a single pot, like you accidentally add too much or too little and you have to keep adding more or go back and add the opposite color. It's just part of the process. Touch my towel. The trip is mostly in this top corner, so I'm just going to use that corner as the place to tilt it to. 21. 5.1 Intro - Complementary Colors: We're through all of our primary, secondary, and tertiary colors. We're going to move on to complimentary colors, which are mixes of opposite colors on the color wheel. They tend to make grayer or more subdued forms of the primaries, secondaries, or tertiaries. We're going to do three different versions of each one. We're going to do red and green. You can see more subdued version of red and a more subdued version of green, orange and blue, and yellow and purple. Then, if you mix more even amounts of these pairs, you get more gray or brown colors, which we'll talk about as we go. 22. 4.7 Red-Orange: Now we're going to mix red, orange or less tertiary and because we're done with the dark colors. I got freshwater because we're going to start mixing a lighter color. I have orange from our previous mix, so I'm just going to squeeze out a little red here and add some to it. This time I'm putting it in the pan because I don't think I'm going to need a whole lot in order to achieve the color I want. I want to do this in a more careful way. Plus I don't have a lot of orange left, which means I'm not going to need a lot of red in order to change it. I don't even know if I have enough. I guess I do. Because I don't have very much though, rather than just rinse my brush, I'm going to scrape off what's left to make sure I can serve as rinse touched the towel to soak up the drip. Let's test that. Yeah, actually, I think I made it. This one is not very saturated. It's a good mix between red and orange, but it's a little bit too heavy on the water. But what I just made here is just a more saturated version of that. That should be good. We're going to painted in. How that's so satisfying to finish the last tertiary, it's so pretty. Feel free to turn your board by the way, or I may have said this already. If you want to get into corners that feel difficult to get into, if your board is turned a certain way. Just pick it up and move it around so you're comfortable. Rinse, touch the towel, tilt and not much drip there, but I'm going to just touch what there is. We're done. 23. 5.2 Yellow-Purple: Now, we're going to move on to the complimentary colors, and since we started our wheel with yellow, we will start with yellow, purple. We're going to make three different versions really of the compliments, we're going to make a yellower version, which is going to look like this. That's mostly yellow with a little bit of purple. Then we're going to make one that's mostly purple with a little bit of yellow. Then we're going to make one that's going to be even mix between the two or it's not really even because purple is so strong, you actually do need more yellow. But we are trying to come as close to center as we can, and it's going to look something more like this, like a light brown. We don't have any yellow left, so I'm going to start by mixing a nice yellow. I'm going to mix a lot of it again, about three-quarters of a cup because I'm going to be using it three times, once for the yellower version, once for the more purple version, and once for the middle version. So I want to make sure I have enough to begin with. If for some reason you run out, you can always mix more, so don't worry about it. Start by mixing a good strong yellow. I'm just going to test to see what this looks like, even though we don't have to match it to the wheel. I just want to make sure it even shows up, and it's not just light yellow water, and that's actually a really good strong color. So I'm going to stick with that. I don't happen to have purple in my kit, and you may have the same situation or you may have a purple. If you have a purple, you're welcome to squeeze a little out and add some directly to your yellow. Don't squeeze it directly in because purple is so dominant. What we're trying to do first is the more yellow version. You want just very little purple. Since I don't have a purple, I have a reddish purple over here that I'm going to add a little to. But because it's a reddish, I'm going to have to add a little bit of blue as well to make it more of a middle purple. So I'm going to start by adding the reddish color, reddish purple. Mix that in, and that's definitely warmer in color, warmer is that term in art that's used when something is more sunny colored like yellow, orange, or red. So I'm going to add a little bit of blue and that should cool it down a little bit. Make it just a little bit less sun-shiny. That's looking more like mustard. In fact, I think I went a little too far, you can see it's turning green. Green being the product of yellow and blue means I went too far with the blue. So I'm going to add some more of the reddish purple. The compliments are notoriously a little more difficult to mix than the primary, secondary, and tertiaries because they're so nuanced. Just a little bit of color usually changes them pretty dramatically, and you may often find yourself going back and forth between colors, but that is part of this process. So don't be discouraged by it, in fact be encouraged by it. If you're having to mix a lot, you're probably doing it just right. That's pretty good, but it's not very saturated with color, it's light, kind of watery. So I'm going to add some more yellow and then a little bit more purple to get it more concentrated. As we know, yellow is the less dominant color, less saturated. So I squeezed it directly in there because I know it's not going to change it that much. When you're trying to saturate a color, you actually want to start with too much of the less dominant color because that will saturate it. Then you can adjust the color itself by adding whatever color you are trying to change it with, in this case it's purple. So let's check the saturation now. That looks better, that's a big drip. So let's get rid of that so we can see the true color. That looks better. I just want to see how saturated that looks. Now I'm going to add some more red, purple to get it back to the color I want. I also went a little overboard with the water, you can see it's falling over the edge here. Which is another reason why it was difficult to saturate. In fact, I'm going to get rid of some of this color. I'm scooping up brush fulls on purpose, rinsing them into my water just to make it a little bit easier to mix. Or you can soak it into your towel, whatever. So the last thing I added was red so I'm going to add a red, purple. So I'm going to add a little bit of blue, and then we'll test that. I think maybe I went a little far, I'm not sure. It should be a golden brown color. Oops, I've still got a big drip on there so I'm going to soak that up. Yeah, that's better. Now I'm going to paint it in right below the yellow, since it's more closer to the yellow color, we're going put it right next to the yellow. The space is smaller so really utilize the very tip of your brush. I need a little bit more paint to get that into all the little corners. Rinse, touch, tilt and soak up the drip. That's a big drip so I'm going to have to do it a couple times. All right, so that's our yellowy yellow-purple. 24. 5.3 Purple-Yellow: Now we can just use the same cup and add more purple and what we're going to go for this time is the more purple version. I'm going to start by adding some red purple and this time I'm being pretty generous with it because I know I really want to get more of a purple color. Scrape, prints, touch, more red purple and that's looking pretty good. Kind of orange-y, which is good because it's mostly yellow and red. Then I'm going to add a little bit of blue. Sure what I've got there like pea soup, but browner, delicious. I'm going to add more red purple because I went overboard with the blue. Let's see what we've got here. Scrape, test, prints, touch, soak up the drip and I think I need more purple but let's check it out. Yeah, pretty close but just a little bit more purple. I'm just going to use the rest of my red purple. That may not even be enough. I may have to mix more. Rinse, touch and a little bit more blue, scrape, test. Yeah, I definitely need more purple and getting too brown, I want more of a muted purple color. So wait, you know what I have more red over there. I'm just going to mix up more purple by adding some red to the blue. Now that's not nearly enough. I just realized I broke my own rule. I added the less dominant colors to the more dominant color. I'm going to rectify myself by mixing in here instead and that is looking really sappy, so I'm going to add some more water to it after I get all the color off my brush. There we go now we have an actual color again, quite red. I'm going to add a little bit of this bluish purple to it to get more of a purple color. That's probably too much. Back to reddish purple. But since we are going for a yellow purple hybrid, I was just using the red purple before because it happened to be there. I'm going to go for now a more central purple color. So that looks about right. Yeah and now I can add some of that to here and I probably won't need to add more blue because now I have more of a middle purple color. But we'll see I may have to add more blue. Scrape, test, touch. Nope, still pretty brown. I'm going to add more purple. And as you can see, I'm once again kind of approaching capacity in this pot. So I'm going to get rid of some of his color again, soaking up, brush full, rinsing it out. You could also alternatively soak some up with your towel or sponge but that's really dangerous because if you accidentally soak up too much, there's really no getting it out of the sponge or towel without squeezing back in a bunch of other colors that might be in your sponge or towel so it's better to just do it by a brush full. Okay, now I'm going to continue adding purple and let's see what that looks like. It's getting there. Oh no, I made it. Okay. We're going to add that to the purple area over here right underneath the purple shape trapezoid. I keep wanting to say square, but it's not a square. Then we'll tilt and soak up the drip. Done with that one. 25. 5.4 Red-Green: Now we're going to do red-green. I'm just going to use the blue-green that I had before. I'm going to show you a different way to do it than we did with the yellow-purple. At the yellow-purple we had yellow, and then our reddish purple and a blue. I was adding those two alternately. Another way to do it is to start with a straight green. Or I could have started with a straight purple over here by mixing the purple first. So I'm going to get rid of some of this green because there's too much of it. It's dominant in blue, which is the stronger color. That means I'm going to have to add a lot of yellow to get it back to a middle green, and then I'm going to add red directly to it. Red and green are pretty much similar in strength, so it doesn't really matter if you add red to green or green to red. In this case, since we have the green already mixed up, I'm just going to squeeze this directly. Since we have the green already mixed up, I'm going to add the red to it later, after I get to it back to a straight green. So we'll start by adding yellow, and I added a big chunks. I think that actually did it, what we needed it to do. That is nice and saturated. I just want to see how it compares. It's actually still a little heavy on the blue. But since we're not going for green, we're going for a red-green, I'm going to leave it and we can always adjust later with a little more yellow if we need to. I'm going to squeeze out some more red over here, I could've squeezed that directly into the color, I just chose not to. You can do whichever way you want. This green is very saturated, very intense. So I am going to have to add a lot of red in order to get the color I'm after. Since we started with green or adding red, I'm going to go for the greener version of the color. It's just easier than fighting your way to the redder side and then back to the greener side. So we're going to go for something like this. There's not much drip there. It's so soupy and dark. It looks like I came pretty darn close. This one's actually a little bit browner than mine, but I like this one better. It seems more of a match to with dark green, so I'm going to use that, and paint that in right below where the green trap where it is. Let's touch the towel. I doubt there's going to be much drip here because it's so soupy. There's not much drip. I'm just going to leave that and we're done with that guy. 26. 5.5 Green-Red: Now we're going to mix the redder version of that color. Instead of adding red to this because it's so thick and soupy with that dark dark green, I'm just going to have to fight my way to red. I'm going to start a new pot with red and add a little bit of this to it. I'm going to use this one over here just for the sake of showing you how to clean out a pot. It had orange in it before and honestly, that wouldn't make much difference. I could totally just mix the red in and add green and you'd never know it. But for the sake of showing you how to clean one of these, we'll just clean it. You can just use a wet, damp brush, wipe it out, and then wipe it on your towel. That's it. Very exciting. Now I'm going to add the water. You can see it's pretty dirty water but again, we're mixing these muddy colors so it really doesn't make much difference. But feel free to get clean water if you like. That's absolutely fine. I'm going to add the red to it. Let's see how saturated that is. Not very, I've got a nice light pink, so I'm going to add some more red. Touch the drip better but I know it's coming, which is that soupy, soupy green, so I'm going to keep adding red. I want to make sure it can stand up by itself. Yeah, that looks pretty good. Now I'm going to add just a little bit of green because it's a darker color. I expect it will be more dominant than it is. Going to add a little bit more and then test it. I think I might have had some water on my brush when I did that. Either that or it's just not saturated enough. So I'm going to do it one more time. Yeah, it is a little bit darker than that first test. I'm pretty close. It looks like it could use just a little bit more green. Touch the drip. That looks exactly the same. I'll add a little bit more green. That's looking better. I think I've got it. I'm going to paint it in right underneath the red. Rinse touch, tilt the board, soak up the drip. Also, makes sure and save these colors we've just mixed, the red-green, the green-green, and the yellow-purple, because we're going to use those to mix a central green for each combination as well after we're done with these outliers. 27. 5.6 Orange-Blue: Now we're going to mix the more orangey version of the orange blue complement, which is this color right here. I'm going to use the yellow orange because that's the closest color I have to orange. I've got a lot of it. It's been sitting there a while. See if I stir it up, there's some sitting on the bottom, so I'm just going to mix it all together to make sure I have the authentic color. I'm going to get rid of some of it. Scoop, rinse, touch. Tilt, rinse, touch. Because I have too much and if I try to mix in there, it's going to take forever to get the color I want. I'm going to get down to about half a cup. There we go. I'm just going to add a little bit of red and I have some red over here to try to get back to middle orange. Let's see what I've got. That's why I could use a little more red. That looks pretty much exactly the same. Get more red. There we go. Now remember, blue is very strong, so I'm definitely not going to squeeze it directly in. I'm going to put a little bit off to the side here. I'm using the phthalo blue again. I'm just going to take the tiniest little bit on the tip of my brush and mix that in. You can always add more but see how quickly that turned dark. What we're going for is just like a dark orange, an orangey brown. I think we might've gotten that on the first try, which is very uncommon. That doesn't usually happen to me. I'll take it. I'm going grab that and paint it in red below, little more paint. Right below the orange trapezoid. Rinse, touch, and tilt the board, soak up any drip. 28. 5.7 Blue-Orange: Now, we're going to mix the bluer version of that same color which is going to look something like that. So I'm going to add some more blue to the orange and this time I'm being pretty generous with it because I know I want to get way over to the other side. But as you can see that was pretty quick because blue is very, very strong. So stir that up really good, scrape, test, touch, and let's see where we are. All right. Got it. Fun. The advantage to mixing a color that has heavy blue is that it's usually easier to get because blue is so strong. Rinse, touch, tilt to get the drip to come down to one corner, and soak that up, and again. 29. 6-1 Yellow-Purple Center: Now we're going go back to the yellow purples and try to achieve a color between the yellow and the purple version, so it's just really subtle, something in the middle of those two. We left off with the more purple one. I'm going to add some yellow to it. Because we're trying to get just a little bit yellower, I'm not going to, that has blue in it. I'm going wipe off the lid, I must have accidentally touched the blue with the yellow tip. That's still got a little bit but it's better. Since there's blue in this color anyway I'm not going to fret too much about it. I'm going to add a little bit of yellow to this. Again, yellow is the weaker color, so you can add a little more than you would if you were adding purple, but you still want to go pretty light, with it. Now, rather than hold it up to there, I'm just going to hold it up to here and see, it doesn't quite match the purple, it doesn't quite match the yellow, you want to get right in between those two and I think I've achieved that. I'm going to paint that in, to both of these triangles by the way. The one below the yellow and the one below the purple. Yellow, purples generally tend to be more brownish in color than gray. If you ever want to get more of a gray color from mixing yellow and purple you just start with a little bit of a blue or purple. Because anytime a color is brown in color, it just means that you're heavier on the yellow and red, it's a warmer version of the complement. 30. 6.2 Red-Green Center: So now we're going to mix a color between the red and the green, the same way we did between the yellow and the purple. I'm just going to use the same red that I used before to fill in this one, and add a little bit of the green from here. If you happen to have more red and less green, or if your red is superior than your green, more saturated, you can do the opposite and add red to your green. I just happened to have this situation where my green is really saturated, and I have a lot of it. So I'm going to try to get somewhere in the middle, and these middle grays are the most challenging because you're trying to fit them between such a narrow window of two other colors. So that definitely still looks too heavy on the red, which is good because that means I didn't add too much green. So I'm going to add a little bit more, and it takes a lot of patience, just be patient and add a little bit at a time. Test every time if you want, or every other time, or whatever, just whatever you're comfortable with. Still a little too red, little bit more green. Ideally, what we're going for here is a straight gray, like a steely blue, not blue necessarily, but a grayer color. What I'm seeing still is a redder, browner color. What may happen, because I can see my green is a little bit on the yellowy side, is that I may have to add some straight blue to it to get to a gray. If you remember, I was talking about earlier how, if your color appears brown, it's just heavier on the yellow, and orange, so we need a little bit of blue. Even though, I'm getting there, I think I'm going to do that now, I'm going to add a little bit of blue, to try to get it closer to a center gray, and that definitely made a difference. I think I got gray. I got gray. So now, I'm going paint it in, both below the green, and below the red. Not much trip to it to soak up here, but I'll get rid of it. What is was there anyway and that's that. 31. 6.3 Blue-Orange Center: Now we're going to do the last compliment which is a middle compromise between the blue and the orange. The last time I had mixed this one, which was the bluer version of the orange. I don't have a lot of color left. I'm going to risk just adding. I have yellow and red. I'm going to just risk adding yellow and red to it because right now it's a bluer version of the color that I need. Another way to do this would be to mix an orange and add orange to it. You can do it either way. If I end up adding too much yellow or too much red, I can always balance it out with a little more of the opposite or if I add too much of both, I can add more blue. You can choose your own adventure there. Let's see what I ended up with. A browner color, which means I am a little bit too heavy on the yellow and the red. Yeah, so I'm going to add a little bit of blue to it. If I end up running out of color because I didn't start with enough, I'll just mix more. But I am going to be pretty careful to really scrap my brush before I test and paint to try to make sure I don't run out. I think I got lucky there and added just the right amount of blue, because I did end up with just a middle gray color. I'm going to paint that in. Just to reiterate, that was real luck. Usually getting a middle gray takes quite a bit more back and forth than that, so don't be discouraged if you have to add more orange and then add more blue or add more yellow and red and then blue or if you ran out of color. Take your time. Enjoy it. You can always pause the video and come back another time if you want. That is that my friends. Well, after I get to drip. Okay, that's that. 32. 7.1 Recap: To recap what we did today, we learned how to mix primary, secondary, tertiary, and complimentary colors. You learned how to control the intensity of your color with water or with color, you learned how to judge how much paint to mix, you learned how to match colors very accurately, and you learned how to paint watercolor and to an even surface. I hope you had a great time today and I hope you will continue to take my inspired watercolor for beginners class in which we'll paint a lovely painting of seashells, and you can use the skills you learned today in order to approach that class, and if you're interested in any other classes, I have other art classes online, so please check them out. I hope you have a beautiful day, thank you for joining me.