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HOW TO MIX COLORS FOR THE BEGINNING OIL PAINTER

Color is everything when you are painting. Color can bring a painting to its best quality or the lack of color or the wrong color can bring the quality down from a good painting. Always make sure to keep your brushes clean between different colors so as not to pick up or have another color in your brush which will change the desired color. Place the brush in a jar of turpentine to self clean and pick up a clean brush between color selections.

When oil painting – do get an oil painter’s palette to use for your paints. Use a pallet knife to move and mix the paints, pick up the paint with a pallet knife and move to a paint and mix in with the pallet knife until desired consistency. Consistency of paint can be manipulated by using less or more of linseed oil and turpentine. When painting with oils make sure you have linseed oil and turpentine for mixing paints. The usual mixture for a malleable paint ready to put on the canvas is a half and half mixture of linseed oil and turpentine.

When mixing paint – start with the basic color that you want if it is straight out of the tube and mix white with it until it lightens to the desired color. Or if you want a darker color than the basic color in the tube, mix grey or dark purple with the basic color in stages until the desired color is achieved.

Here are some basic color rules for mixing these colors:

Blue – Mix Green and Yellow

Purple – Mix Red and Blue

Orange – Mix Orange and Yellow

Pink – Red and White

Grey – Black and White

The basic pigment colors are:

Black

White

Red

Blue

Green