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"Some watercolorists
prefer to use distilled water
to mix with their paints."

Properties of Watercolor
Home Basics and Skills How to Mix Watercolor
Basic Watercolor Supplies

Additional Supplies

Setting Up Your Supplies

Watercolor Painting Terms How to Mix Watercolor

The Color Wheel
Beginning with water
Understanding Color Temperature Adding your color
Mixing your desired color and value
Selecting Your Primary Colors How to clean your pigments after mixing
How to Use Color In a Painting

How to Mix a Puddle of Color

How to Mix Two Watercolors

How to Mix Three Watercolors

Watercolor pigments arrive to you at their full paintable strength, either in a tube (moist color), or in a
Mixing the Complement pan (dried color). To use watercolor, you dilute it first by mixing it with clean water. How much water
Mixing Tips and Advice you mix it with it determines both the depth of it's hue and value.

Watercolor Values
If you are new to watercolor, this is an excellent quick start guide on learning how to actually how to
Making a Value Scale
make, and mix, a puddle of color.

How to Mix a Puddle of Color - Tutorial

For this demonstration, I will be using two tube colors; New Gamboge and Permanent Rose. Both of these tube colors have
already been allowed to air dry in my palette, and are no longer moist.

To start your puddle of color, take your

clean watercolor brush and touch the
bottom of your clean water container. This
will open up the brush hairs to the ferrule.
Take your fully loaded brush, and either
thump it a couple of times in your mixing
Begin with water well to release the water, or slide the brush
against the rim of your mixing well to
release the water.

Stroke your wet brush across the top of

your pigment, Permanent Rose. Bring your
watercolor brush back to your puddle of
water and mix the two together. Do not
rinse out your brush. Just slide your
Adding color brush against the rim of your mixing well
once.

Continue to add more brush strokes of the Permanent Rose, until you get the correct
value of color you are trying to achieve.
 To add another color: do not rinse out your brush after completing Step 2, and move on to Step 3.

Stroke your watercolor brush across the

New Gamboge. Bring your brush back to
the puddle, and mix the New Gamboge
with the Permanent Rose.
Adding a second color

Continue adding brush strokes of the New

Gamboge to your puddle of Permanent
Rose, until you get the color, and value,
you are trying to achieve.
Mixing the desired color

This method of mixing watercolors is my personal favorite. It helps me achieve

the right color and value with the least amount of attempts. Don't worry if your paints
get dirty. I will show you how to clean them.

How to Clean Your Watercolor Paints

Once your watercolor paints have been allowed to dry in their designated wells, there is really no need to rinse your
brush between colors. Here's why: Once the pigment has been allowed to dry, only the top layer will get contaminated.
The color underneath remains pure. When you are making a puddle of watercolor, just switch back and forth between the
two watercolors you are mixing until you get the correct color, value and size puddle you need. No need to rinse.
Otherwise you will be rinsing out good pigment as well as lightening the value of your puddle by adding extra water from
your rinsed brush, making it harder to achieve a darker value.

After you mix the color you

want, take your clean wet
brush and tickle it across the Paper towels seem to
top of the paint to loosen the work best for this
contaminated color. method of cleaning
your watercolor paints.
Tissues tend to stick to
the moist paint and
often leave lint
particles.

Then take a moist paper towel

and lift out the dirty color.

NEXT: How to Mix Two Watercolors

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 Step-By-Step Guide to Painting Realistic Watercolors © 1997 - 2013
www.watercolorpaintingandprojects.com Copyright © 2013 Dawn McLeod Heim. All Rights Reserved.