Color Lessons For The Beginner

There are three primary colors. The problem with primaries is that we can not determine what a true primary is. During the lesson we see an example example of our inability to choose a specific blue as primary. Therefore, we need to have two tubes of all each primary, red, blue, and yellow.

Mixing the primaries is something you just have top know, but there are only three facts. Red and blue makes purple. Red and Yellow makes orange. Yellow and blue makes green. Orange, green and purple are secondary colors. Primaries and secondary colors are bright, clean colors, such as you would use to paint flowers. As these colors darken, we call them neutrals.

Once we have the correct 6 tubes of paint, we can mix every color of the rainbow. We also learn that mixing "across" the wheel we can create any dark (neutral or gray) of any color. Neutral colors include, Among many others, brown, mustard, indigo, olive, etc.

Now that we have all of the clean colors and all the neutrals, we can thin any one of them with water to produce a "tint". Tints are very light colors like pink and gray.

Color is one of my five elements of composition. They are, line, shape, value, color and texture.

This lesson is not only useful for painting with watercolors. but also with any art medium such as acrylics.