Tips for Water Color Mixing

In this article, through a method of diluting pigments, the additive and subtractive mixing methods of pigments and methods of wet bonding of pigments aim to deepen your understanding of solid watercolor paint mixing techniques.

Watercolor is a method of painting in which transparent pigments are mixed with water. Watercolor painting is not suitable for making large works, but for making small paintings such as fresh and bright scenery. Here are some tips for mixing watercolors. 

Dilute the paint

The method to improve the brightness of a single color pigment is to dilute it with water. The pigment becomes less pure after dilution. For example, dark blue becomes light blue after adding water. The color is brighter but the purity is not as pure as the original dark blue. Any one of the primary, secondary and complex colors can be diluted to improve the brightness, but often in the mixture of two colors, at the same time for dilution.

Additive color mixing

The principle of additive color mixing is the synthesis of light. There are several ways to achieve additive color mixing. The first is the folded space color mixing method. This method makes use of the feature of poor resolution of detail in human eye space to get three kinds of primary colors close to each other in the corresponding position of the same plane. As long as the three basic colors are small enough and close enough, human eyes will feel the colors of three kinds of primary colors after they are mixed at a certain distance. The method that this kind of space mixes color is the basis that makes color TV at the same time. The second method is folding time color mixing. 

Using the visual inertia of human eyes, three primary colors of light appear in the same place on the same surface in sequence. When the time interval is enough, human eyes will feel that the three primary colors of light appear at the same time, which has the effect of the color obtained after the addition of three primary colors. This additive method is the basis of sequential color television. The third is the folding physiological color mixing method. When people's eyes are watching the same color scene with different colors at the same time, they will get two kinds of color impressions at the same time, and these two kinds of color impressions will produce additive and mixed color effect in people's brain.

Subtractive mixing

The principle of subtractive mixing is dye synthesis. Subtractive color mixing method USES the absorption properties of pigments and dyes to achieve color mixing. In this method, yellow, magenta and cyan are commonly used as the three primary colors, which absorb their complementary colors respectively, namely, blue, green and red. Therefore, when the three primary colors are mixed in different proportions in the subtractive mixing method, the blue, green and red colors will also be absorbed in the corresponding proportion under the white light, thus presenting various colors.

Wet connection of pigment

Wet joint refers to the previous color is not dry, and then take advantage of wet to connect another color, in the two colors where the paint mutual infiltration. But from the perspective of the color block to see this infiltration is a small range of infiltration, and basically all colors remain the original properties. The picture effect is completely different. A principle that should follow when warm receive color is bicolor moisture should be quite, can appear otherwise run lubricious phenomenon, namely the color of a party flows freely to go to another party, and lose bicolor respective and independent attribute.

If you are interested in watercolor painting, hope this article can be helpful for you. Hangzhou Medo Import and Export Co., Ltd. is a professional art material supplier, whose products including professional watercolor brush pen,  watercolor pad, nontoxic solid watercolor cake, and other art materials since 1990's.