With acrylic paints, we tend to believe that simply adding black to the paint will darken it. And that’s a mistake. As we shall see, black can be added, but only under certain conditions.
Here we’ll look at three ways to darken your acrylic paint while maintaining a superb rendering and vibrant colors!
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The importance of values in painting
To understand how to darken your paint with the best of methods, you need to understand how values work in painting.
Value is the degree of brightness of a tone. To put it simply: depending on the light, your color is darker or lighter. Don’t mix with saturation, which corresponds to the intensity of your color.
To learn more about values and how to master colors for your paintings, I highly recommend: 50 nuances d’abstrait.
In practical terms, when we say a paint is “light” or “dark”, we’re simply talking about its value.
To understand value, it’s useful to use a value scale.
N°1: Darken a color by adding black
Yes, I know, as I said above. Darkening a color with black is not the most appropriate choice. And yet it works in some cases. For example, with cool colors. However, with warm colors, this will have the effect of “dirtying” your colors.
Here, for example, I add black to my cool colors. We can see that the result works well.
N°2 Darken a color by adding its complement
This is the most academic method. It consists in darkening the tint of a paint by adding its complementary color. To do this, use a color wheel and pick the color opposite yours to obtain the complementary color. Use a very small amount of this complementary color and blend. Be careful, there’s a breaking point you mustn’t reach, or your mix will veer towards your complement.
No.3: Darken a color with a chromatic shift
I love this technique and use it very often. It consists in darkening by using an adjacent color that is darker on the color wheel. For example, here, if I want to darken my yellow, I’ll use a little orange, and to darken my orange, I can use red. In this way, you can effectively darken your shade without straying too far chromatically speaking.
Bonus: Combinations
Last but not least, the secret of beautiful blends lies in your ability to analyze the context of your painting and combine the different methods. For example, I sometimes go dark with a complementary color and then add black to broaden my scale of values:
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