Playing with Paint

When I was originally investigating watercolors, I was taught to make swatches of color mixes. Friday, I got some more paint colors (Golden) so I decided to go ahead and do three swatch pages: yellows and blues (greens), reds and yellows (oranges), and reds and blues (purples). This was a very unscientific process where I made charts and mixed each pair approximately 50/50. I tried to vary the mixes a bit and paint multiple different mixes in each pair; some colors, like the phthalos, I had to stray from the 50/50 ratio fairly drastically to get close to the target color. This was a very interesting and useful process because now I have a permanent record that will tell me which colors to use to mix a wide variety of secondary colors. I also learned which primary colors make good secondaries and which do not (Pyrrole Red does not make good purples, but makes nice oranges, for instance). If you haven't tried this with your paints, I recommend it....it's tremendously educational and also fun.