Watercolour Mixing Charts

I was perusing through my art files… aka  boxes and stacks of notes, studies, colour charts, sketches.    And rediscovered these 2  watercolour charts that I’d created from cobalt blue, winsor lemon and permanent rose watercolour paints.

 

My eye gravitated to the deep purples the warm purple  Big  “R”  small B      and compared it to the cooler purple Big “B”  small R.

B =  cobalt blue     R =  permanent rose     Y  = lemon yellow      H20  = water        if its in CAPS, then it means there’s a higher ratio of that colour;  if lower case  ‘b’   it means just a little bit of it!

 

I had been thinking about colours of everlastings, irises and dephiniums and mauve lotus as I’d been taking some photos of those recently.

All the petals are purple/mauve;  but in order to create the illusion of depth I would need to make sure that some petals were ‘warmer’ redder,   and some were ‘cooler’  bluer.  This increases the feeling of depth, whereas if all the petals were the same purple – the flower would look very flat.

By making some colour charts and having them handy…. not in the bottom of a box!  It helps to select the warms and cools of a colour, thereby  creating a painting with much more depth and perspective.

The chart shown really only took a short time, about 15- 20 minutes to mix the colours and another 5 or so to label them up.

Pretty quick for such a helpful tool!