Transcript: Learning how to color mix with a color wheel and two sets of primary colors.

Hey there my name’s Jen Fletcher. I'm a mixed media artist who uses watercolors, acrylics and lots of mark-making tools to create the artwork that I love. I believe that creativity flows like the seasons, where we each have a chance to plant, grow, gather, and rest. Today I have a tutorial for you to help you with your color mixing. It’s a tip that I learned a few years into my painting journey and I wish I had known it a lot sooner because it makes color mixing way easier. Let's get started.

OK, so this is a typical color wheel. You can make this with any yellow, red, and blue paint that you have. It will help you get any color on the color wheel. It's really helpful to see where the colors are, what the complementary colors are, which are the opposites from each other. But, I want to show you today a different type of color wheel that takes color bias into account and I'll show you what that means in a minute.

When you work with color bias, you're going to have two sets of primaries. So I have alizarin crimson by Winsor & Newton, cadmium red medium, Daniel Smith. Those are my two reds. I also will have two yellows. A cadmium yellow medium and a winsor lemon. For my blues I have antwerp blue and cobalt blue.

Why do I need two primaries? When you start to dig into color mixing you will notice that within the yellow range, even though yellow is considered a warm color on its own, within the yellows there will be cooler yellows that move towards green and there will be warm yellows that move towards orange and you'll see why this is important when we start mixing.

I squeezed each of the primaries out onto this palette. We have alizarin crimson, the cad red medium, the lemon, the cad yellow medium, the cobalt blue, and the antwerp blue. If you are using your color straight out of the tube they will already be wet. Mine were squeezed out the other day so I'm going to activate them with this little spray bottle to help get them started for when I want to grab some color. This is the alternate color wheel I was talking about. You can grab the template on my website. Just head to jenfletcherart.com/colorwheel and you'll be able to download it and follow along with me.

The first thing we want to do is fill in our primary colors. The primaries are the bigger circles around the edges. If you're looking at this color wheel you'll see that we're going from yellow to red this direction, so we're going to fill in our yellow ones. We want our warm yellow, that's biased toward orange to go on the right side here. We want our yellow that's biased to the green to go on this side. So with my colors I have cad yellow medium. I'm going to fill in the circle here. Rinse your brush and I'm going to get the winsor lemon for my cool yellow and fill in the left circle. If you printed this out on an inkjet, the water may try to blur the edges of your circles. If you stay inside the printing then it won't happen. You can mark these so you remember what’s what. So this is cad yellow medium and this is winsor lemon.

Our next primary over here will be the reds. So, we want to put the red that is biased toward the orange, which is our cad red medium toward the orange side. And we want to put our red that is biased toward the violet to the other side. I think you can see now how much more orange is in that red and how much more purple is in that red. That's where you can start to see the biases.

Finally, with the blues, we're going to do the blue that is biased towards the green in this circle and then our blue that is biased toward violet on this side. Ok, let’s mark these. We have cad red medium, alizarin crimson, and then we have our antwerp blue and cobalt blue. If you want to keep them straight, you can mark it with warm, cool, warm, cool, warm, cool. The outer circles. When we mix yellow that is biased toward orange and red that's biased toward orange you're going to get a brilliant orange color. So, let’s do that first. We're going to get our cad yellow medium, mis it with our cad red medium. And we get this really bright orange. That's because both of the colors are moving towards orange. They want to work together. So this was a warm and the warm mixed together. So you can put W plus W to remind yourself.

Next, we're going to see what happens when we mix this cool red which is biased toward violet with the cool yellow which is biased toward green. So they are not going to work as well together. Let's see what happens. So, we're going to mix alizarin crimson with the winsor lemon. We're still going to get an orange. Let’s paint it in here. So, this orange is more muted then this one. That's because the lemon yellow has green in it and green is a complement of red. When you mix complements, they start to tone each other down, they become gray in the middle. Because they're toning each other down, they're canceling the colors out, you're going to get a muted orange instead of a brilliant orange. So this was the cool plus the cool.

We can try another one, try with the lemon and, with the lemon which is biased toward green, and the cad red medium, which is biased toward orange. So we have one that's going toward orange, but we have one that's going toward green. So we have our winsor lemon, we’re going to mix that with our cad red medium. You can see again we have a more muted color. And that was the cool plus a warm.

Let’s work on our violets. If we mix antwerp blue, which is biased toward violet, and alizarin, which is also biased toward violet, we should get a brilliant purple color. That is a very purpley purple. You'll see it better if you're playing along. So that was a cool and a cool coming together both biased towards violet. So what happens if we do our warm cobalt blue, which is moving toward green, with our warm cad red medium, which is going toward orange. So they're going the opposite directions. If it works out like the orange did we're going to get a muted color, a muted violet. We need our cobalt and our cad red medium. And you can see that it's a very grayish purple. That's because the colors are canceling each other out again, so they're muting them down. That was our warm plus our warm.

Now what happens if we mix our warm cad red medium with our cool antwerp blue. We get a muddy violet. These are all colors you can use. The point is you want to know what you're going to come up with when you color mix. If you're constantly getting a muddy purple, it could be because the red and the blue you are using are not biased toward the violet. So using this method you will be able to create the colors you want more easily. So this was a cool plus a warm.

Alright, let's do our blue, or our green. So if we do our cobalt blue, that's biased toward green, and our winsor lemon, that's also biased toward green, we should get a pretty brilliant green. Our cobalt and our lemon. So that is a pretty bright, lime green. That’s a very pure green. That was our warm plus our cool. Now let's see what happens when we mix our cobalt blue, which is biased toward green, with our cad yellow medium, which is biased toward orange. That is a much more muted green than this one. For the same reason, the complements are canceling each other out. That was our cool plus our warm. For our last one, let's see what happens when we do our antwerp blue and our cad yellow medium, which are both biased away from the green. It's another muted green.

So as you can see the biases can help you get the colors you want more readily. You'll have a better idea of what color is going to come out when you mix something together. As you practice more color mixing it becomes more second nature, you’ll start to be able to predict what colors are going to come from the colors you are mixing. It also leaves room for experimentation, exploration, and surprises. I hope you liked this. If you want more simple tutorials and gentle creative exercises, you can subscribe to my channel. You can also go to jenfletcherart.com to see all of the tutorials listed under the blog section. You can also sign up for my newsletter, which will let you know when each video is coming out and also a heads up when original art is released. Thanks for watching.