Acrylic Painting Links

In order to mix your paints, you have to know some basics about the color wheel. There are three primary colors: red, yellow, and blue, and we use these to mix the secondary colors: red and yellow make orange, yellow and blue make green, and red and blue make purple. If you mix all three primary colors you get anything from brown to black. For a good color wheel diagram, see The Artist’s Toolkit.

At least that is the theory. However, if you have tried to mix acrylic paints, you know that this is not always true, and that mixing two colors can just as easily make a pile of mud brown. This is because acrylic paints are not always pure colors, each one has what is called a bias. A bias is a touch of another color mixed in with the base color to get a color variation. For example, French Ultramarine is a blue with a red bias and Prussian Blue is a blue with a yellow bias. Cadmium Yellow has a blue bias, and Cadmium Yellow Deep has a red bias. This means that you can mix Prussian Blue and Cadmium Yellow to get a good green, but if you mix Prussian Blue with Cadmium Yellow Deep you will get a muddy green because you are actually mixing all three primaries, not just two of them. For more information on colors, see the Winsor & Newton website.

If you are a beginner, use six colors so that each primary has a different bias. For example, use French Ultramarine (red bias) and Cobalt Blue (yellow bias), Cadmium Yellow Light (blue bias) and Cadmium Yellow Medium (red bias), and Alizarin Crimson (blue bias) and Cadmium Red Light (yellow bias). If you want to mix a clean secondary color, make sure you mix two primaries with the same bias.

One successful artist who uses a limited palette is Kevin Macpherson. Read his book Fill Your Oil Paintings With Light & Color for good instruction on color mixing.

Another good source of information on color wheels, color palettes and color harmony is the Virtual Art Academy course on Color.