You can experiment with your proportions, but this pigment usually comes out with a brilliant, beautiful, light green hue. To mix a more earthy green, add ultramarine blue. This shade isn’t as vibrant, but it’s nice and earthy. You can also experiment with mixing orange and black or grey. This combination produces a green that’s dark and closer to brown.
What happens when you add terracotta pigment to red, blue or yellow?
As an artist, exploring colour might be one of my most favourite things to do. While a creative process, there are ultimately a lot of technical aspects to consider; primarily, the science of mixing pigments.
When working with Jesmonite, the official pigments I have access to are red, blue, green and yellow. I can also mix with black and white and some ancillary colours that include coade, red oxide, yellow oxide and terracotta.
For the purposes of this demonstration, I’m only going to use the colours I already have in stock: red, blue, yellow and terracotta.
Black and white are not colours, though they are very useful for changing the shade of the colour you’re mixing, ie. Adding more black creates a darker shade and adding more white will produce a lighter shade.
Adding more coloured pigment will increase the saturation of the colour, mixing coloured pigments will alter the hue and adding more black/white will adjust the shade.
As an aside, there are unofficial Jesmonite pigments you can use, including powders, paints, inks and more. The Jesmonite pigments are reliable and compatible with Jesmonite whereas other branded pigments may not be able to achieve the precise colour you desire or mix as evenly throughout the product.
Why does adding brown create richer, earthier colours?
If we highlight brown on the colour wheel, it sits within the warmer side of the wheel. The families of reds, oranges and yellows will result in a different warmth of brown.
Therefore, if you’re going to mix brown with a primary colour, you’re going to introduce warmer tones. This is why the colours feel richer and, well. warmer.
The Process
For this demonstration, I am simply mixing 1:1 red, blue or yellow with terracotta.
You can achieve vastly different colours be adjusting that mixing ratio, but I wanted to show what happens when you add equal parts red, blue or yellow with terracotta.
Firstly, I am adding 1% red, blue or yellow to demonstrate the unaltered colour. Then I’m adding 1% red, blue or yellow with 1% terracotta to demonstrate the effects of adding terracotta to a primary colour.
Note, Jesmonite recommends a maximum mix of 2% pigment added to the material; any higher than this could risk the structural integrity of your casts.
Primary colors vs. secondary colors vs. tertiary colors
You’ll see primary and secondary colors everywhere when you start looking for them. Primary, secondary, and tertiary colors define our world and how we experience our environment. Learning to understand how to mix colors benefits you as an artist or printing specialist.
Artists working with “subtractive colors” pigments can learn a lot from blending primary, secondary, and tertiary colors. However, the last thing we want is the dreaded “muddy color” spectrum landing on our canvas. Those colors aren’t exactly what we had in mind when we mixed things up on the palette.
For example, you might want to paint a bunch of cherries, accentuating the deep red color of the delicious fruit. But it’s not enough to splash some red paint on a canvas. You won’t get the desired color effect. You need to add some secondary color to get the deep red effect you want – and that’s where the problems come in.
The RYB (Red Yellow Blue) Color Model
Primary colors are red, yellow, and blue, and they’re everywhere you look in some format or another. Secondary and tertiary colors exist in our environment, but our visual system doesn’t take as much notice of them as we do primary colors. It’s just the way our brains are hardwired.
Creative people notice the full spectrum of primary, secondary, and tertiary colors because it’s in our nature to do so. However, working with pigments as an artist usually results in “Subtractive Color.” The result is mixing colors that end up looking dull and dirty.
To get the best results from your color mixing, you’ll need to learn the root of every pigment you use in your color palette. Yellow, Red, and Blue, the “primary colors,” are at the top of the color hierarchy. You can think of these three as the parents of all the future color generations. They are the root of all other colors.
So, you could mix dozens of other colors using the three primary colors, yellow, red, and blue. Most of us learned this principle in school during art class at an early age, but many of us tend to forget it. The reality is color mixing isn’t an exact science. There’s a “grey area” in the task. Excuse the pun.
The issue is that paint pigmenting never really works out as we expect in real life. For example, if you mix Ultramarine blue and red, you end up with a muddy mess. You might have been expecting a deep violet color, but the resulting brown surprises your eyes.
To understand why this occurs, we’ll need to look at paint pigments to understand what happens when they interact with each other. Primary colors like red, yellow, and blue only contain one color pigment. They’re unmixed, and you can’t create them by mixing different colors.
Paint manufacturers create their products using mineral, organic, and chemical pigments to get the desired color product. As a result, several pure yellows and blue and red pigment paints are available at the art store.
Does orange and blue make dark brown or light brown?
Knowing which colors mix to produce a light brown is just as important as learning how to mix a dark brown. To make a light brown, you just mix colors that are lighter than the dark brown color you have at the moment. What two colors make brown lighter? So, it might seem obvious to the trained artist that mixing white with brown achieves this task.
However, you can also achieve a similar result by mixing yellow into the brown pigment. Mixing in yellow makes the brown lighter and warmer simultaneously. Adding light green also helps lighten brown colors while providing a hint of green to the pigment.
While neither yellow nor green will make the brown as light as adding white to the pigment, it does make it lighter while adding additional color to the final pigment. However, adding white to lighten it often makes the final color pigment look “chalky,” sucking out the color.
To counteract this effect, you’ll mix titanium white into the brown and add yellow or green to provide the brown an additional color effect. You can use different yellows to mix up a brown, turning it purple. Lemon Yellow is a lighter, brighter yellow pigment that helps to give you a more golden brown.
Yellow Ochre is another great choice for mixing up with brown, giving it a very earthy final color and visual effect. There are also several other ways to darken brown colors to achieve darker shades of brown, whether it’s a straight or mixed brown pigment.
So, what colors do you mix to make a dark brown? Dioxazine purple and ultramarine Blue create very dark browns when mixed. Ultramarine Blue creates a cooler brown than Dioxazine purple.
