Let's make colour!

Hi my lovelies

You know what?! I am so relieved you have stuck with me and forgiven my rather extended absence.

Computer problem fixed: check.

Am I itching to paint with you? Yes!

Are you ready to paint with me? I hope so!

Previously on Paint with Me...

So, a very long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away) I was taking us down the path of painting a tree.

Why a tree? 

Because a tree is identifiable... I want you to throw away your "it must look like" feelings towards painting (or drawing for that matter) and take comfort in the fact that a tree is a tree.  As long as it is grounded and reaches happily toward the sky, then that's perfect for what we will do!

Before we got started painting, I was going to take us through some basic colour blending, so that you could be familiar with the primary colours you have chosen.  This helps to understand the expected paint blends with your paint...you aren't going to achieve a beautiful crisp apple green with a warm based blue and yellow.

Let's bring us to today....

It was at this point I was going to post a rather long winded blog about colour mixing, but who am I fooling?!  This is the web and there are oodles of wonderful resources providing the same content.  So please do have a search for primary colour mixing: the web really is a modern day marvel for information.

At the most basic level, this is what I want you to do:

Green Mixing:

1. Paint a nice swatch of your yellow;
2. Next, add a small dab of blue to your yellow, mix and paint the resulting green next to your yellow swatch;
3. Next, add another dab of blue, mix your green and paint next to your previous swatch.
4. Continue this until you have pretty much reached your darkest green...the step before your pure blue.

Orange:

1. Add red to your yellow in small quantities, painting small swatches gradually in steps all the way up to your red.

Purple:

1. The same again, adding the blue to the red.

What did you get?

You know, the first time I ever did this I was surprised.  I honestly thought that my red and blue would indeed create purple.  A nice rich royal purple.  Nup, instead I had some sort of rusty colour, that was sort of purplish, but was not even close to my minds eye vision of purple.  

So what did I do?  Well, I threw in some more red...no, that's not it!  And on I went, trying to create a colour that would never happen.  I thought I had "mixed it wrong".  The true problem was I hadn't started from the right base.  

Don't even start me on green!  Where I expected a happy lush new green, was a muted olive. Olive I tell you!

So were your results what you expected?

Knowing what you can achieve with the colours you have at hand is the first step to creating your beautiful painting - you can have the best composition in the world, but if the colours don't sing for you, then you will never be happy.  Let's face it, olive green may be exactly the type of tree green you are after.

Next step....brown!!

Happy painting, and be back soon!

Hugs