Mixing Recipes – Blacks and Darks with Watercolor.

In this article, I will teach you how to mix blacks and darks with watercolor.

So, I am obsessed with color. When I first started painting, I would buy any color I saw. It wasn’t until after I got serious about painting that I studied color.

Well, what a surprise I realized I had wasted a lot of money on colors that I could mix on my own. This helped my paintings by creating a color harmony that you can’t get by just grabbing colors that do not relate to each other.

Mixing Charts

Black is one color I never buy anymore. The blacks and darks you can mix are much livelier than the premixed tube colors.

KEY

UB – Ultramarine Blue

BS – Burnt Sienna

DP – Dioxazine Purrple

AC – Permanent Alizarin Crimson

PG – Phthalo Green

PB – Phthalo Blue

Mixing 3 primary colors can create black.

For the chart below, I added two examples of using the three primaries (red, blue and yellow) to get a black.

These can take a bit of practice to mix. The trick is to mix 2 primaries first, creating a secondary color (orange, green and purple) first and then add small amounts of the last primary to it.

KEY

UB – Ultramarine Blue

PS – Pyrrole Scarlet

HL – Hansa Yellow Light

QR – Quinacridone Rose

NG – New Gamboge

PB – Phthalo Blue

You may not have these exact colors but experiment with the ones you have. One trick to mix good darks is to stick with transparent colors.

Do you have a favorite color mix for black? 

Do you have a color that you use for your darks that you would like to share?

Are there any colors you would like to know how to mix?

Please share below, I would love to know.