Part 7: Mixing Your Paint on the Palette | Do Not Be Afraid of Watercolor Series
Welcome to the Do Not Be Afraid of Watercolor Series. In this video we learn about mixing your paint on the palette in a way that sets you up for success on your watercolor journey.
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PAINT COLORS USED IN THIS VIDEO:
Ultramarine blue
Burnt Sienna
Permanent Rose
Transparent Yellow
Viridian Green
Windsor Newton Blue/Green
Full Video Transcription:
Good morning, and welcome. My name is Paul Valdez. And I thank you so much for joining me on my Do Not Be Afraid of Watercolor series. I'm trying real hard to make you a professional beginner while avoiding making all the same mistakes that I have made in the past and trust me. There's going to be a lot of videos. I've made a lot of mistakes.
Please do like and share this video with other artists or friends that you feel this might help. Today, we will discuss mixing paint on your palette. Wait, what? “Is there another place? I would mix paint?” You ask.
Well, yes, of course on the paper itself, but we'll discuss that in another video, actually in the next video. So we're getting closer. We're actually putting paint on paper and this is exciting, but I want to show you just a couple of mixes that I feel are very important.
My two favorite colors to mix and of the Blues, ultramarine Blue is probably the warmest of the blue. It's great mixing color, and it pairs really well with burnt sienna. So here, I have two really nice colors. And I like to just bring them in slowly and let me show you what we have here. So we creating kind of a brownish grey. Before I do that, let me actually show you. Here we go. This is just burnt sienna. okay, and then this is just ultramarine blue.
Okay, so now we're mixing the two. We came up with this little interesting mixture, add a little bit, make it a little bit more on the warmer side with just a little bit more Brown. Now, little bit on the burnt sienna side. Now, let's bring it to the more gray neutral. Beautiful gray and then we'll go even more. You can see the difference. If you want.
You can actually go even make this a little bit more greyish blue. Maybe we'll go even a little further. And then we are here at nice blue again from kind of a grey to blue. And then what we'll do is we will just back track and we'll take it back to the grayish Brown and then back to the more or less the burnt sienna state, beautiful, beautiful mixture. When this dries you'll see a nice little transition, but these are some lovely mixes.
And then if you really want a nice dark, you just come in. There you go. And look at this beautiful dark right here that you can make with a mixture of burnt sienna and ultramarine blue. Very difficult to make this on the paper. So sometimes you do have to mix these on the palette first before you apply them to the paper. And of course, the more water you add to this... And with a cleaner brush, the lighter your value will be. Most artists, beginning artists. Really hate learning this part because they want the finished house.
They want the room finished in decorated. They don't want to learn the bones in the structure, and I can't tell you how important this is. So now I'm going to turn this around so that we have paper and you can see it on the video screen and we're going to change to another mixture. This is permanent Rose and beautiful bright. As you can see, just a beautiful glowing color fairly strong somewhat transparent and it is very beautiful for mixing.
It's great to mix with just about any color. You could take this color here and mix it and you got this but it's stains a little bit. Like this would be very difficult to get off because it stains but with this color here, you can pretty much mix anything because it's very transparent. Now this color over here. Is called transparent yellow. So obviously very transparent and let me put that here for you. You can see how transparent that is. Okay.
Now, let's take some of that and mix it with some of this. And now we're coming into some beautiful sunset colors. Maybe some flowery colors when you put the two together. That will add a little bit more of this. Now value wise that's about as dark as you're going to get it without mixing, anything. That's straight almost straight out of the tube.
There it is. Okay, and to, to gray that down, of course, we're going to use a little Veridian of rhydian. Is the only green I have on my palate more or less is turquoise over here. Viridian is a cool green there. And Viridian is pretty versatile like it a lot and it mixes. Well, it's easy to make a cool color like Viridian warm rather than taking a warm color and trying to make it cool.
So when you mix these two together, you're going to get this nice dark. And if you keep going, little of that, a little this you're going to actually get a really nice dark. Okay, did you see? I don't know if you noticed that there's a little paint there on my little splotch and that's because I didn't work out my paint. So when you take paint from here, whatever color it is, you want to work it into your brush like this work it out.
Otherwise, if you have a piece of pigment stuck on there, you'll end up getting a little line or something, but watch how we can just go right over this. So these two colors mixed together, bring in a little lemon yellow and you got beautiful different colors. Hard to mix those on the paper. So you really want to learn how to mix permanent rose on your palette. I’m going to take this is Windsor Newton. Blue greenish shade, take a little bit of transparent yellow.
Look at this, gorgeous screen that we have just mixed now. It's going to be fun. You're going to learn a lot. I promise. I love to mix color. I love the power of pigment. I love the power color, but do not ever forget the power of greys. Okay, you can't have the dark without the light. But sometimes you cannot have the light without the greys and the dark. So don't forget those greys. They are as important as these beautiful colors here.
And where you get greys is by mixing opposite colors. So if I take a little bit of this a little bit, this we get more grey, you can see how grey it is. Maybe just a little bit more, take away some of that Rose. There you go. Now watch when I put this next to this yellow. It'll just make that yellow sparkle. That grey makes that really jump out at you.
So these are my two dynamic duels. I use the burnt sienna, ultramarine blue, permanent Rose, transparent yellow and Windsor Newton, blue greenish shade. I use those a lot to to do mixes on my palette a lot of possibilities. Lot of possibilities. Okay, so we have mixed multiple colors and then on the palette and then apply them to the paper.
In the next video, what we'll do is actually put colors on the paper and let them mix among themselves. I think you're really liked that video. I sure hope you like what you're seeing. I sure hope it's helping you. Drop me a note if there's anything else you'd like to me to do or if you have a question and again, like and share. Talk to you next time.
