Great Pairs of Colors

How to keep a record of great pairs of colors

By Vladimir London, Watercolor Academy tutor

In this video, you will discover how to keep a record of great pairs of colors that you may come across when making watercolor artworks

To make beautiful watercolor artworks, you need to know your paints. A great way of learning your watercolor paints is by preparing color swatches of every paint you have. Here are my swatches. You may notice that these swatches contain such essential information as the manufacturer and paint name, pigment code, transparency and permanence data. Every swatch also has a black line that shows through the paint layer. This line makes it easier to see the transparency of each paint. I usually arrange swatches according to the color temperature. This makes it easier and faster to find a particular color. Also, if you have a lot of paints, you can make a separate swatch book for each manufacturer. When I purchase a new paint, I add a new swatch to keep the collection growing. You can also write some helpful information on the back-side of such swatches, for example, how staining the color is, how well the paint granulates, or how it behaves when mixed with other colors.

Another way of using color swatches is by adding a card with colors in the same arrangement as the paints in your box. This helps to see colors, paint names, as well as other information such as transparency and permanence.

However, having color swatches is not enough for knowing your paints. Every time you make a new watercolor artwork, you might discover some new mix of two colors that you find beautiful or suitable for some purpose. Make a note of this pair of colors. I would suggest keeping a small watercolor sketchbook where you can illustrate the great pairs of colors and note their names.

I will show you some examples of color mixes I like and often use in my watercolor artworks. First, I write down the pant names together with the pigment code and transparency symbol in graphite pencil or ball pen because it is better to do so while the paper surface is dry. Then, I apply two colors as gradients from dark to light tones. Two colors overlap each other, mixing in the middle. The obtained color softly gradates from one paint to another, giving the range of hues between two mixed colors.

It is down to your personal preference which paints to mix. It is not an exercise of mixing every possible combination, but finding the best pairs you can use in your artworks. Such pairs can be complementary colors, which means they come from the opposite sides of the color wheel; for example violet and yellow. Complementary colors will mute each other, resulting in beautiful chromatic grays. Different violet and yellow colors will produce different grays. Some might be more saturated than others, and this is the beauty of color mixing. You do not need multiple ways of obtaining the same gray color, but different ways of getting various chromatic grays that look vibrant and pleasing. After all, you want to keep your colors vibrant and bright when painting in watercolor.

Another complementary pair of colors is blue and orange. When mixed, these two colors also produce chromatic grays, but with different hues. Depending on the tinting strength, one color may overpower another in the mix. That is why you need to learn not only which colors to use, but also in what proportion to mix them.

Although paints from different manufacturers might have the same names, their composition and hue might vary from one brand to another.

When it comes to the question which paints to mix, it depends what results you want to achieve. Mixing complementary colors from the opposite sides of the color wheel will mute the hue, desaturating it. If you want to enhance hues, you may mix colors that are located on the same side of the wheel.

Testing your set of colors is a very handy exercise to learn what you can achieve with a limited selection of paints. Professional painters do not buy every paint available on the market, but learn which paints suit their creative style and how to get the most out of such a range. In addition to great pairs, they also learn how to obtain chromatic grays by mixing two or more complementary colors. Such complementary colors are located on the opposite sides of the color wheel. Of course, for this task, students know this theory well, and have already done several exercises on creating the color wheels, as well as mixing colors to get the needed results. Nevertheless, even if you know the theory well, from time to time you may come up with good looking results when making some artworks and I would suggest adding such color swatches in your sketchbook for future reference.

Keeping a sketchbook with color swatches and mixes of hues really helps to plan your artwork. You may get some good ideas and inspirations from such sketchbooks before you put a brush on paper or canvas. This will not only save time, but also prevent you from making unnecessary mistakes. This is not a project, but a process. From time to time, you may buy new paints and it would make sense to add new color swatches into your sketchbook. Also, your preferences might change over time and having a good understanding of what to expect from certain paints and brands will help you to shape your color palette. Talking of brands, different paint manufacturers may have different names for the same paints or different colors under the same names. That is why you may add notes about brands as well as pigment coding and indicate transparency of paints.

A good artwork doesn't require many colors. A colorful painting can be done with only two or three paints. You may also make some color sketches with your favorite pairs of colors to see how such hues look in practice. Here are some artworks by the Watercolor Academy students that are done in a very limited palette of colors.

By the way, in the Watercolor Academy Correspondence Course, there are special tasks on painting in only two, three and five colors as well as in monochrome in addition to full color painting. Such tasks give very good experience in wisely using the paints you have and learning your art materials. This watercolor course comes with unlimited personal tutoring and 100 practical watercolor tasks. We guarantee that by the end of this course, you will achieve the advanced level of watercolor painting skills.

To learn how to paint in watercolor, enroll now