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guide to color mixing
11 Jan 2025
By Admin | 11 Jan, 2025 | Color mixing, Color wheel | 0 Comments

How to mix colors to get the color you want

A quick guide for beginners on how to use the "color mixing guide" located on the other side of the color wheel.

The result of mixing certain colors can also be seen without rotating the disk, simply by observing their relative position on the wheel.

How to obtain the blue-green color by mixing paint

A basic example: in the middle between yellow and blue is green, which means that if these two colors are mixed in a 50 to 50 ratio, you get green. If you add more yellow, it will be yellow-green (on the wheel closer to yellow), more blue - blue-green:

color mixing using the color wheel

If we set the yellow color together with blue, we will see the same result in the small rectangle at the bottom located inside the disk:

By the same principle, rotating the disk and aligning the colors opposite each other, in the windows of the disk, we see the result of their mixing in equal proportions. Another example: By mixing green and blue, we obtain the blue-green color, which we can see both in the window at the bottom and on the outer part of the disk, positioned at the center between the green and blue segments.

how to obtain the blue-green color by mixing paint

However, artists often face the opposite task: there is a color we see (e.g., in the photo we are using as a reference for drawing), and we need to determine which colors to mix to achieve it. To do this, it is necessary to rotate the disk to find in one of its windows the color closest to the desired one. A sufficiently large number of shades are collected on the wheel, but since nature has an infinite number of them, it is very difficult to find an exact match. But you can always find a similar one and see which paints need to be mixed first. This intermediate result can then be adjusted to the desired one by adding a bit more paint as needed. Usually, this can be determined visually, for example, it looks like the same color, but it is too bright: tone it down with black, and voilà! The mixture is ready.

Saturation scale

saturation scale

A few words about the saturation scale. Here’s an example: we need to obtain the blue color to paint the sky. Naturally, blue is the result of mixing blue with white. But exactly how much white paint should be added to the blue? For this, we observe the gray scale and find on it a saturation tone as close as possible to the blue we need. If we are drawing from a photo, you can place the photo directly under the scale to make the comparison easier:

determining color saturation

When comparing the saturation of a color with shades of gray, only the brightness should be compared, i.e., activate a black-and-white vision mode. If the color of our sky is closest in brightness to tone 5 on the gray scale, no white paint or very little needs to be added to the blue paint. If we see tone 4, add one part of white to blue (proportion 1 to 1). Tone 3 - proportion 2 to 1, and so on.

In the example, we see that tone 4 is closest in brightness to the brightness of the sky in the photo, which means that we add the same amount of white to the blue paint, and then slightly adjust the mixture's color:

determining color saturation

Tones 6 to 10: the paint needs to be darkened by adding black. With a bit of practice, you will be able to more accurately determine the blending proportions based on the gray tone number on the wheel.

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Color mixing, Color wheel

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