How to colour match an acrylic landscape painting - mixing paint colour

Morning class, I'm Will Kemp from Will Kemp Art School and today I'm going to show you how to mix and match colours for a landscape painting. Here it is lets get going! So the first thing I do is try and acess the tones that were looking at, to try and decide which colours are going to be best to start off the mix. So for this example video, I'm just going to show you how to mix the sky blue, this cloud which is a muted purple and this area here where the sun is just coming through and really bursting, making this nice warmth feel on to the painting. So we’re going to try and match these three colours and I'm going to show you how to do it. So when I'm assessing the blue you've just got to find what colour on the colour wheel  is closest to the colour your trying to match - so this one obviously is the blue, so let’s put out some blue and some white. When I'm trying to judge this blue I'm looking at its value, value is just how light or how dark something is on a grey scale. So here when I look at this blue it is closer to the white than it is to the black, so to try and match it I'm going to start with some of the white. Blues always alot higher tinting strength than the white, so you can add just a small amount, see how I just scrape a bit and mix that in. Okay, that’s still too light, we still need to add a bit more of the blue to it, okay, we’re getting closer in tone but this blue is too blue. I mean we can put a bit more blue there, but its too purpley when we look at it. So to try and knock that back were going to add something to the blue to make it not as bright. So now I've added some Burnt umber and this looks very dark but in fact is a very useful colour. Burnt umber has got an orange base to it, the complementary colour of blue is orange, so to mute it down we need to add a bit of its complement but instead of using the bright orange I'm just going to add a touch of the Burnt umber. So you can see how that has greyed that tone down so now that’s a lot closer, it might need a bit more of the blue back in it but for getting it quite close, that’s a perfect colour to start with. So the next colour we’ve got down is this area of the clouds here. Clouds can be tricky to paint as your brain will often tell you that they have to be light and bright and all the colours of the rainbow mostly towards grey but when we look at a sunset  to really get that contrast, to make this white here of the sun coming through really look bright, you've got to make sure you go dark enough on this area of the cloud. So if we look at the local colour of the cloud we can see its a purpley hue in comparison to this blue so we’re going to need something to make a purple. We won’t be able to do it with these three colours so were going to have to introduce a red. To mix this purple I'm going to start with a bit of the blue, a bit of this red and then some white.   Okay, so in terms of it’s hue as in it’s colour its pretty close to parts of this you see parts of that area there on the cloud, maybe parts here, it’s quite close especially over in that side. This is quite a useful colour to have for this painting, so what I’ll often do if I’d mixed this and it wasn't absolutely the colour I was after but is still quite useful. I’d make a little pile of it there, drag some of the paint off, and just add some more to this one,knowing I’ll be able to use that colour in the rest of the painting, so now with that darker tone that kinda blends in pretty well - that’s good to go!  So now for this final colour down here, this quite muted orange. We’re going to use red and a yellow to mix that, but of course with these we cant, so we’re going to have to add a yellow, and we’re going to use some Cad yellow light. So because its lighter, Im going to start with the white again, oh, I've got a bit of yellow on there thats ok, ok, defiantly defiantly too yellow, so we need to make it more towards orange, so add some of the red. For some parts of this that’s quite nice, quite a good colour to have as a base, again I might need to go a bit lighter for it so I’ll keep alot of this colour, add some more white to this pile and this is starting to what I call colour strings. Colour strings are when you have one mass tone of colour and then you add slightly more, slightly more white so you get a tonal range of colours which is called a tonal string. You’ll notice that when you add white to a colour it brings out the purpley hues and knocks back the warmer yellows and the reds, so now when we look at that we see that its quite close there. It might need to be toned down a bit, so to tone down this colour here I’ll add a bit of the Burnt umber to it, only a small amount and what that’s just done is just mute it down. If you want to learn more about colour mixing and painting have a look at my website at www.willkempartschool.com