Paint and Sip Melbourne 

Get Started with Painting Part 4 – How to Mix Colours

In this Getting Starting with Painting series, we have Ruby, who is also a DYA creative instructor, sharing with us on how to mix colours!

What are primary colours?
What even are secondary colours?
How do I mix colours?

Primary colours consist of: red, yellow, and blue. From these 3 colours, we can mix into all sorts of beautiful colours. How cool is that!

Pro tip: always have clean water and a piece of wiping cloth because colour mixing can be quite messy!

Mixing Primary Colours

 

Colour mixing combos to make new secondary colours:
Green = yellow + blue.
Orange = yellow + red.
Purple = red + blue

Slowly mix these two colours and add more primary colours as needed to create the colour that you want!
You can be creative and experimental here too! You can use different shades of each colour and mix them to get more pretty colours.
When mixing yellow, Ruby said make sure that we add a bit more yellow because light colours can be lost quite easily if it’s not mixed/applied enough.

How to Get Lighter Colours or Pastels

 

To get lighter or pastel colours, you can simply add white to the mix and voila! You get some of that creamy, gorgeous light tones and gorgeous pastels.

 

How to Practice Shading

 

A good way to practice shading is to try adding white paint. Dab some white paint on one end and start with bringing the white colour into the rest of the primary colour. 

 

How to Get Darker Colours

 

Simply add a bit of black paint at a time and then slowly mix it with the primary colour. Here Ruby mixed a bit of black paint with the red paint to get a beautiful gradient. 

 

Cooler vs Warmer Colours

 

Ruby demonstrated how to create more colours with the same blue colour but with different warmth in them. She also explained that generally, cooler tones tend to mix better with other cooler colours and vice versa. 

Here she mixed warm red and warm blue together and we have a different shade of purple as compared when she mixed cool red and cool blue. How amazing and interesting this is!

 

Want to Learn More?

 

Keen to know more about how to mix colours? Come join us at Paint For Fun creative painting workshops and we’ll teach you all about it!