Today I would like to tell you a little about watercolor paints and their mixing.

If you want to feel free with watercolors and to know which color to add, when to do that and how to get the desired result, the most important thing is to constantly practise, gain experience, and eventually you will begin to understand how your colors behave individually and in a mixture with each other. But in addition to permanent and long-term practice there are several exercises that can help you to get a feel of how to choose a desired color.

One of the most effective approaches is making a color map — the mixing table of all the colors that you have in your palette with each other. In order to make a map, you'll need a sheet of watercolor paper (or even Whatman paper, I have it), a ruler, a pencil and a flexible brush (I have a flat one because I can make filling with smooth edges) and, of course, watercolors. First you need to line the sheet: I made a top horizontal line and divided it into 18 pieces of 1.5 cm and drew vertical lines from all the marked points.

I divided the first vertical line in 17 parts of 1 cm, made horizontal lines.

Sign the top and the side row of cells with names of colors that we will mix.

Now we have a table that we will continue to fill in with our mixed paints. Let's get started!

My palette begins with the lemon cadmium.The very first cell must contain the mixture of this color with itself, I fill it with a clean lemon cadmium. Each cell located at the intersection of two identical colors will be filled with clean paint.

To do everything faster, you can make the desired amount of puddles of lemon cadmium on a palette and just add the right color to fill each cell :)

And gradually begin to fill the table. First, I mixed lemon cadmium with light yellow and fill in the cells corresponding to this mix with the resulting color.

So I mixed lemon cadmium with all the remaining colors from the palette.

By the way, I do not wash the palette and just sprinkle it with water from a spray bottle and wipe with a paper towel)

Then again, I fill one cell with pure light yellow and mix the color with the remaining colors.

In the end you should have something like this. :)

This color table will help you to feel all the colors of your palette and, if you have troubles with getting the right color, you will be able to determine it by looking at this table :) This table is needed to see which mixture is obtained when you mix two colors in equal proportions, but if, for example, you mix green and add more yellow than blue, you get a completely different color, and vice versa. So you can make another exercise — the color stretching.

I drew several elongated rectangles. At first I was mixing orange cadmium and ultramarine — this mix is familiar to many artists, it results in a beautiful pearl grey. You can start with moistening a rectangle with water to make the paints spread and to start to apply color. To the left is orange cadmium, and to the the right — ultramarine. I add orange and spread it over the paper to the middle of the rectangle with a brush, do the same with ultramarine. We must get a neutral gray color in the middle, the more orange shades of gray to the left and more blue shades to the right. For convenience, you can paint the resulting mixture individually, in order of changing the hue.

I repeat the process with red cadmium and cobalt blue (so you get lots of gray-violet shades), pink and green (they give a rich wine color with a variety of shades from bright maroon to brown).

I also mixed purple with emerald, purple with yellow and burnt sienna with ultramarine.

By making these exercises, you will better understand in what proportions to mix paint to get the right color. Do not forget that you can get very interesting shades if you mix colors which are far from each other, as I said in the previous DIY. Try to mix the most unexpected colors, the ones that you would never try to mix, and you'll see, you'll get a lot of unusual shades that you have been looking for, but couldn't mix :)

I can also advise to position the colors available in your palette in order of the color wheel. To do this, simply draw a circle.

And start adding colors, for example, from cold yellow to lemon cadmium, then add to it a little warmer color — for example, light yellow...

Yellow ochre, natural sienna, orange cadmium, and so on. I decided to "pour" colors into each other, First, I do not have to wait for them to dry, and second, the circle looks more harmonious :)

For convenience, you can sign all the colors.

Now you have a color wheel that includes all the colors from your palette, which can also help you in learning colors. You can explore the features of the color wheel in accordance with your personal choice of colors (for example, to identify a beautiful combination of colors, etc.)

So, I tried to tell you about good exercises that will help you to learn your palette, I hope it is useful, interesting and clear! :) Ask questions and write what else you'd like to hear about the watercolor technique, and I will gladly share with you my experience! :)

Thank you for your attention and I am waiting for your comments!