How to mix rich watercolour blacks for more harmonious paintings
Sylvie Peltier SUMMARY: Mixing your own blacks is a great way to harmonize your paintings and create richer watercolors.
There are a lot of beautiful black paints available on the market, but if you strive to create harmonious paintings, it is best to use pure black in only very limited areas.
This is because black being your darkest value, it immediately attracts the eye and can easily become your focal point if it's applied next to any light color.
There are two ways to tone down your blacks and make them more harmonious:
1. The easiest way is to add another color to your black. For a warm black, try adding a touch of red or yellow. And for a cool black, add different shades of blue. Use warm and cool blacks next to each other to make any dark area look richer and less like a dark hole.
2. The next way to incorporate harmonious blacks in your paintings is to mix them yourself.
Arts of Course expert Jess Rice prefers to mix his own blacks and he shares a few of his recipes with you in this video:
Rough Video Transcript
Today, I'd like to show you how to mix your own blacks.
A lot of artists use black in their palette. There's lots of beautiful blacks out there.
I like to mix my own. I don't tend to get muddy colors from them. They seem to work with all the other colors that I'm working with. But if I introduce a black, I'm not really sure what colors are in it.
And sometimes I'll get muddy colors from it. So, I kind of stay away from the blacks. I like to mix my own. I think they're more fun. They're richer. They're more interesting to look at, I think. So, I'm going to show you how to mix three different blacks, kind of a lighter one, a mid-tone and then a darker one.
And then I'm going to show you how to kind of shift the color of the black to different colors so it can range between a purple or a blue to more of a yellow or green. The base that I use for my blacks are usually Phthalo colors because they're the darkest that you can get and they're the thickest.
Thickest colors or the richest colors. I use a Phthalo Turquoise, a Phthalo Blue Red Shade and an Ultramarine. The Ultramarine is going to give me a little bit lighter black, Phthalo Turquoise is going to be the most intense black. And then Phthalo Blue is kind of a middle ground black.
Let's start with the lightest one, little bit of Ultramarine. Mix it up on your palette. And then to that, I had Alizarin Crimson, and that makes a real rich purple.
Make sure it's all mixed into your brush. You can see what a beautiful, what a beautiful color that is and how nice that would work with all the other colors in my palette, I want to also show that you can gradate these colors just by adding a little bit of water to them.
You can lighten them up. That's a beautiful color to work in your painting. So that's Ultramarine Blue and a little bit of Alizarin Crimson. A little bit of Phthalo Blue. A little bit of Alizarin Crimson.
Really load your brush up. Just a little bit more Alizarin Crimson. Much darker, much darker color. And I would probably go over this a couple of times in my paintings as well, so darkening up as I go. Nice, rich, dark color.
And another dark color that I use quite often is a Phthalo Turquoise. I love using Phthalo Turquoise. It's a beautiful color to work with, and I really like it as a black. It's got a little bit of yellow in it already, a blue base with a little bit of yellow in it.
Nice and rich. And then I have a little bit of Alizarin Crimson. Mix it up. And it makes a real rich, dark black. A beautiful color to work with. It's a really nice base, color to work with.
If you want a darker color, a little bit more blue, I'd use the Phthalo. A little bit darker, use the Phthalo Turquoise. A little more purplish, the Ultramarine. Ultramarine has already got red in it, so it's going to read a little bit more purple.
Now, if I want to shift these more to the brown side or the yellow side, I can just start adding a little bit more yellow to that dark color. It just shifts that dark color over to a greenish color.
So just by adding another color, I can shift it either way. I can shift it to the red side, to the blue side. So just a little bit more yellow to the Phthalo Blue mixture different green, still nice and dark.
Let's shift this one even more over to the red side. Well, almost burgundy. A little more brown in it, this one, I could shift more to the yellow side as well, more to a brownish sides by adding a little bit more yellow.
Nice, dark brown. It's got all that red in it, so it mixes with the yellow. It's going to give you some nice browns as well. So those are the dark's that I work with. Just with those six colors of those three colors, basically with Alizarin Crimson, you can make a wide variety of darks that you're going to use in your paintings. They're much richer. They're much more interesting to look at. And they interact with the other colors much better, because I'm going to use a lot of those same colors to mix in the rest of my painting.
Interested in learning more?
Paint cute black-faced sheep mixing your own blacks
Check out our great online courses
Visit our Watercolor Club Facebook group
Download our free Top 10 Watercolor Tips by 200 passionate painters
Categories: Watercolor Paint, Watercolor Techniques, Watercolor tips