Experimenting with color-swatching is a favorite thing to do for me. So, I was happy to have a chance to play with the new spring set of colorsheets from Viviva. (photo not endorsement at all but in case you’re unfamiliar). I also hadn’t saved any swatches from my Lukas cyan-magenta-yellow set so used this project for instructive play. I’ll save both outcomes for reference.

I was enticed when I saw the colorsheets around and thought it might be fun to have these for outdoors. Personally, I found them to be the most awkward paints to mix of any I’ve ever mixed. If I’m away from my studio, I want simple.

These individual colors swatch out remarkably bright. I omitted a couple of darks like “Tree Bark.” I used only primaries for mixing but was out of space before I got to use metallic blue #11. The set includes a nice orange (Saffron) and some nice greens with #’s 8-11 in metallics. 

The big challenge using wet-on-wet mixing with these was how quickly the first color dried, even if I put it on a water circle. In some cases, I see only a rim of color I’d use from pulling paint out of the circle. The other challenge was flipping through the color sheets and getting paint on my hands.

In mixing these colors, the most useful color was #4 of which there is only one square in the set, so it will get used up quickly. The top row and a couple others use Happy Yellow with only one muddy color result using Indigo #7. Indigo surprised me in its otherwise mixability given how it swatches. Also, I was surprised how bright Cherry Blossom (#1) was easy to mix.

This was a helpful and fun experience. ( I also have a set of the main Viviva colors awaiting swatching. That set is more stable in a little cork palette so might be easier to use than the colorsheets when on-the-go.) 

Lukas Paint-Mixing with Cyan-Magenta-Yellow Primaries

First a question: Yasmina, how did you get that really true red in the color chart when you used this combination? 

This set is easy to use if I need a good range of greens, oranges or purples. Never got a red as red as the one Yasmina got for her color chart, but mine are in tubes, and I believe she used liquid paints.

I truly had fun with these and time flew. For each primary color I did a big patch of wet-on-wet. The resulting colors popped and made me happy. Regardless, I would not want this 3-color set to be my only paints although they could be in a pinch. They produce a good black and neutrals also.