How to mix colors in acrylic paint?

A painting full of varied colors! Multiple hues, a palette of a thousand shades! Use the exact color you want! Are you tempted?

Should I buy ready-made acrylic paint tubes? Or how do you make your own acrylic paint mixtures?

How to mix acrylic paint?

Of course, you’ll find plenty of different-colored tubes of acrylic paint in art supply stores. Easy to use, they offer a wide range of ready-to-use colors. In some cases, you’ll find a boxed set of the main shades. Alternatively, you can buy colors individually.

💡However, I’m going to recommend the opposite ☺️: make your own color mixes!

Why mix colors?

Make your own color mixes:

• to obtain the exact shade you want;
• understand how paint mixtures work, so you can master them. You’ll feel much more at ease handling colors!

➡️ Painting with fluidity requires a variety of painting techniques, including knowledge of blends.

Learning how to mix colors is essential for harmonizing your paintings. Understanding allows you to make sense of what you’re doing 😉. Chromatically speaking, the different shades of paint are interdependent with each other.

How to mix acrylic colors?

🪧Beforeyou start: I recommend that you 👉 download my equipment guide, in which I recommend the equipment to be used here: brushes, knives, rollers, sponges, paints, varnishes, medium, etc.

That’s where the magic of acrylic paint comes in! To get all the possible and unimaginable colors, you simply need 3 tubes, 3 colors: the 3 primary colors.

With the 3 primary colors, all the other colors can be obtained with a little practice.

The 3 primary colors are magenta, primary yellow and cyan (primary blue).

Learn how to use the color wheel, which will help you create your various paintings.

In painting, color mixing is based on color synthesis: here, with the 3 primary colors, we’re interested in subtractive synthesis. By mixing these 3 primary colors, you’ll obtain black.

Additive synthesis concerns the colors red, green and blue: mixed together, they produce white.

📌 Mixing 2 primary colors gives a secondary color.

📌 Mixing a primary color with a secondary color produces a tertiary color, which is even lighter.

📌 C omplementary colors are those that are opposite each other on the color wheel. These colors used together in a painting make the work vibrate in a magical way!

How to make a chromatic circle easily

Experiment: build your own color wheel to master color mixing. It may seem difficult at first, but with a little practice, you’ll be able to handle the tones with ease!

🖌️ First, place your three primary colors in a triangle on a blank sheet of paper, already imagining the circle to come.

🖌️ Next, using a knife, scoop out the paint and mix it with the other primer using a brush.

🖌️ Create the secondary colors: violet, green and orange.

🖌️ Then, between these secondary colors, add a degree to obtain your tertiary colors (greenish-yellow / orange-yellow / red / light violet / royal blue or ultramarine / emerald green etc.). These tertiaries are obtained by mixing a primary color with its secondary.

This color wheel is the basis for learning how to mix colors. To take things further, you can then add degrees.

To do this, move your brush from hue to hue on your color wheel (starting with yellow, the lightest): you’ll get a fade of all the color gradations!

Ultimately, learning to mix colors will help you come up with painting ideas. When you’re in front of your canvas, the color wheel will help you associate the right colors to achieve a harmonious, flowing composition.

So grab your brushes: test, try, discover and try again!