A Simple Way to Avoid Mud with Betty Franks Krause
There’s nothing more frustrating than working along and realizing at some point, you’ve created mud. Mud often is the result of too much or unintended color mixtures that end up with a strange brown
This is different from creating neutrals. Mud is its own thing.
So how do you avoid mud?
Ep.10 guest, Betty Franks Krause has a great approach to building up her layers in a way that creates mud free paintings.
Here’s how Krause works.
First, she works in a single color temperature at a time. This means she uses colors on one side of the color wheel at a time.
For example, she may work in her cool colors first, which means she lays out her purples, blues and blue greens (plus white). She paints using only colors from this side of the color wheel, using them straight out of the tube or mixing with adjacent colors as she goes.
By only mixing with adjacent color wheel colors, this means even when she mixes colors, she’s keeping them fairly bright.
She works with those paints until she’s happy with what she has.
Then (and this is the important part) when she’s ready to switch color families, she lets that layer of paint dry completely.
Next she lays out her warms and begins working within that color family on top.
By keeping the colors separate, she ensures that she keeps her mud to a minimum, resulting in brighter paintings.
Put it to Practice:
Colors mix easily when they are wet. And mixing wet-into-wet is a tried and true way of working. But it does increase the likelihood of mixing mud.
By letting a layer dry first, you are greatly reducing your risk for mud. Watercolorists and oil painters both do this through glazing. (Although oil painters must wait much longer between layers.)
No matter your medium, if you find yourself accidentally getting mud, take a look at how you are building up the color in your painting. Could you work with a color family at a time for either a layer or an area of your painting, before consciously switching to another color family?
You might find that this helps you brighten your colors and lowers your risk of mud.