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  How I got slightly less bad at paint mixingOct 26, 2015 10:10 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Okay so I promised I would talk about what I started doing different with watercolor painting mixing beginning on page 34. Actually it's pretty simple. I don't have a ton of work space in my apartment, and I use a little palette with tiny paint-holding bowls in it:
 
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You can get those for like a buck or two at just about any art supply store. Before page 34, prior to beginning the painting each day I would prepare one bowl with red watercolor, and one with blue, each of about medium saturation that would give you a good solid color without overloading the paper with pigment; on their own, red and blue can only get so dark, after all. I would also prepare two more bowls, each containing about the same amount of red and blue pigment as the plain red and plain blue bowls combined: one bowl mixing up as dark reddish purple, and one as dark bluish purple. While painting, if I needed to go darker than the regular red and blue bowls allowed, I'd start throwing in the darker mixes from the purple bowls.
 
That was all well and good but it made mixing up certain gradations of color rather complicated: how to go smoothly from a light red to a semi-dark bluish purple, for instance? So finally I realized I could simplify all that a great deal by just starting with two bowls: one of super-saturated red, and one of super-saturated blue; sure, these may be slightly overkill if you just need a regular red or blue, but they can mix anything from medium to dark blue-purple-red on the fly—and if you need lighter colors, you just add water. I've been using this arrangement since page 35, and it's been helping me get richer colors and gradations.
 
And more color variety! My palette has just 10 mixing bowls, and since I have a small jar in the middle holding all my brushes while painting, the two bowls on the far side from where I'm sitting are rather inconvenient to use, so in effect I have 8 bowls available for regular work. In addition to the two bowls for plain red and blue, I usually have two more for very light red and blue—and with those, plus two bowls taken up by pre-mixed purples, I had only four bowls left for custom mixes while painting—and I was habitually using two of those as overflow containers for the dark purples, since it wasn't possible to mix those back up on the fly (I'd need to dig into my paint tubes for that). So I was really only using two bowls for mixing anything besides my set colors; in practice this meant I was almost always just painting everything with those six: light red, light blue, medium red, medium blue, dark purple-red, and dark purple-blue. It was a little lacking in variety! Now, I can move the two light colors to the back of the palette, since I don't find myself using them as much when I can mix anything easily on the fly (this only occurred to me just now, mind you : P), leaving myself a whopping six bowls in the front of the palette for on-the-fly mixing of any sorts of delicious purples or maroons or ultramarines that I want.
 
Of course, in these all-blue cruiser interior scenes, those don't come into play so much, but uh *otherwise* I think this new arrangement has been helping me get more out of my two little colors. : )
 
 
 
 
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