Take the most garish blue pigment you can imagine and mix it with brown. Then add some white. And suddenly beautiful and subtle teals appear. Who knew?
In the jar, printing ink is not that pretty. The pigments tend to look harsh, verging on the garish. To get subtle or sophisticated colour, you need to mix the pigments. And, sadly, that is a lot like sketching. To get good at colour mixing, it's practice. Lots of trial and error. And help from those with experience.
Without the generous "recipe" from a printmaker friend I don't think I would ever have discovered taking either Phthalo green or Phthalo blue (two of the most vibrant in-your-face pigments) and mixing with a brown (either raw or burnt umber) would give you anything at all. And initially it doesn't do much other than toning down the intensity of the green or blue. Which might be all your needs call for. But once you start blending in white (I used titanium) a whole world of interesting teals and aquas suddenly materializes!
This is the phthalo (thay-lo) blue mixes.
Here I'm using phthalo green.
Below, in the background, is a card by Victoria BC artist Selina Jorgensen -- inspiration for the palette I was going for. I wanted a varied mix of green-blues plus a strong dark that wasn't straight black. Neither raw nor burnt umber worked on its own but with the addition of a bit of black I got a number of interesting darks.
I also did a set of samples mixing phthalo green and phthalo blue together, then adding burnt umber and titanium white. This mix was bolder and brighter. Even simply blending the green and blue (first swatch in the sample) created a more appealing colour than the straight pigments.
Clean-up left this image on the glass plate I used for mixing. (The bubbly bits are soap. I'd already spritzed before I noticed the wonderful abstract!)
Trial and error, with a little instruction thrown in from time to time, is slowly helping me achieve the colours I want. If you lean to the let's-see-what-happens camp, British artist Louise Fletcher has a terrific video on taking any two or three primary colours plus black and white and mixing away. If you prefer a bit of theory, you might check out American artist Carol McIntyre and her approach. It has to do with getting a handle on "cool" versus "warm" primaries and greatly reduces the chance of mixing something resembling mud!
