![]() The secondary color purpleĬolor theory tells us that purple is a secondary color and to mix it we need to combine red and blue. You’ll find a list of my personal paint recommendations here. If you want a good range of mixing possibilities and to be able to make bright saturated color you need to include at least these six options in your palette. A vivid green can be obtained by mixing the hues closest to green, (cool yellow+cool blue). This is why it’s essential to include a good selection of warm and cool primary colors in your color palette. This principal holds true for all secondary colors. A bright saturated orange can be mixed using the hues closest to orange, (warm yellow+warm red). To mix a very saturated purple you use those primary colors which are closest to purple, and furthest away from yellow on the color wheel, therefore avoiding purple’s complementary neutralizing color. Therefore by mixing these two colors together we keep any traces of the unwanted primary yellow out of our mixture. So the more yellow you mix with purple the more dull and desaturated it becomes.Ĭool red and warm yellow are the furthest away from yellow. ![]() Well, if you remember, the complement of purple is yellow. So why does this combination of warm blue and cool red produce a nice saturated mix ? In this case, cool red (Quinacridone Rose) and warm blue (French Ultramarine). If you want to mix bright saturated purple you need to mix the two primary colors closest to purple. OK… Now that you have a grasp of color temperature and complementary color mixing we can demonstrate how to create a nice saturated purple with your watercolors. ![]() How to make a vivid purple watercolor mixture So in general, when you mix purple and yellow paints you get a neutral brown color which has been desaturated. A neutralized color is a desaturated color such as grey or black. The complementary mixing rule tells us that if you mix two complementary colors, they neutralize each other. Take another peak at the color wheel, you’ll see that the complementary color of purple is yellow. Now that you are able to distinguish warm and cool hues, we need to talk about complementary color mixing.Ī complementary color is any color located on the opposite side of the color wheel from your target color. This makes French Ultramarine a warm red. In a similar way, French Ultramarine is closer to red and further away from green. It is closer to a cool color, therefore this makes it a cool blue. ![]() If you look carefully Phthalo blue (GS) is closer to green and further away from red. The color wheel helps us identify the color bias of our hues. Color wheels are very useful tools to help us understand color mixing. To illustrate how color theory works we’re going to be using a color wheel. To understand why it’s so difficult to mix a decent purple color we need to talk about color theory.ĭon’t worry… I’ll try to make this as painless as possible ! Here are a few things every watercolorist should know about purple watercolor: Purple and the color wheel I honestly didn’t get this for a long time ! But after I gained a little bit of mixing knowledge it became plain and clear. In short, the best results for mixing saturated purple are obtained using cool reds. Mixing intense and bright purple with watercolors depends on the color bias of the paints you are using. A lot of artists struggle to get just the right purple mixture. Purple, violet, magenta, mauve… Call it what you like. Surely, achieving a bright vivid purple shouldn’t be so difficult.Īfter all, everybody knows blue+red = purple… Right? I wondered if it was the quality of my watercolors or maybe something in the paint formula which made my purple so murky. And to be honest I didn’t always understand why my attempts to make purple turned out so bad. Purple is one of those tricky colors in watercolor mixing. Have you ever tried to mix a purple color and then think to yourself:
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