Mastering Color Mixing

Have you ever spent hours on one tiny section of your painting and been frustrated that you just couldn’t make the color look “right?”

Have you come back to the easel and been held up by dried-out mixtures from your previous session that took hours to re-match?

What about that one pile of paint on your palette that started to get away from you, and the harder you tried to fix it the bigger it got until it threatened to take over everything?

Do you spend more time in the studio frustrated with your palette, digging through hundreds of tubes of paint, and reading through books and blogs full of complicated mix charts than actually creating the art you came in to do?

When I walked into my first painting class, I was terrified of color.

I remember backing my easel into a corner so that no one else could see that I didn’t even know how to lay out my palette.

I remember spending hours just trying to perfect a mixture, and at the end of class looking up to see I’d put almost nothing on my canvas at all.

I watched my teachers seemingly effortlessly mix paint and see colors inside of things that I just couldn’t visualize.

A lot of them offered complicated color theory, excellent but difficult-to-remember tips that seemed unconnected, or insisted “it just takes time.”

It all clicked into place when I walked into the studio of an instructor who taught the three qualities of color. Suddenly there was a system - an easy recipe - to explain and remember everything else about color!

The way I saw color changed completely. Suddenly, I couldn’t learn enough about it - and found there was a way to organize all of what I was learning.

I started sharing my discoveries with my own students, and the results were immediate.