Color Theory: Mixing Neutral Colors

Video Transcript

"It's a beautiful color you know, that's a great way to make a, a beautiful purple but that isn't what we want we're looking for something a little bit grayer. Now what we might need in here, we've got blue, red and, and yellow, I might try a touch of green. And that really does dirty it, it muddies it up, this is called making mud but you have to start you know, playing around with these colors and finding out what for you makes mud and what doesn't. I mean that's actually a nice brown, it's a warm brown but it's not what I was looking for so I'm going to try a different tack I'm going to try some blue over here. I'm going to try, take some blue and see what I can do with red but I'm going to stick with red orange. So I'm going to take my red orange here and put it in the blue and red orange has a lot of yellow in it so I'm getting the green. Don't want green, that means that you know, let me go back to my purple and see if a little purple will help that and it does start to, I'm now getting a cool neutral, take a look at this neutral ok? Now this is, this would probably somebody would look at this and say, “Oh it's gray" But it's got life in it. It's got some color in it and that might be more helpful than just going to one of these flat grays from black and white over here. So that was blue with some red orange in it and a little bit of purple but this is what you have to do with your paints. You have to take them all and you have to you know, try them out. What happens when I do this with this and it's only when you start to do that, that you'll start to have the flexibility to be able to say "Oh I need this color and I know how to make it" And that just makes painting, well it doesn't make painting a breeze but it makes it far more enjoyable."