How to Mix Your Brightest Brights

When it comes to mixing your secondary and tertiary colors, Ep.59 guest Steve Griggs knows that not all primary colors are created equal for the job…especially when it comes to mixing bright colors.

Not every blue plus every red, both primary colors, will make a bright purple.

So when he’s trying to mix especially bright colors he needs to take the primary’s temperature into account. For this, he turns to his color wheel.

A color wheel is an important tool to have in your studio. In part because it helps to be able to place the primaries you’re using on it.

When you do, you’ll notice, for example, that some of your blues sit closer to yellow while other sit closer to red.

This will make a pigment warm or cool. If you have a blue sitting closer to yellow, it’s considered warmer than the one sitting closer to red.

Put it to Practice:

When you are trying to mix your brightest bright, you’ll want to try and use two primaries that are as close together as possible on the color wheel.

For example, if you take a warm red and a cool red and mix it with a blue, the math looks like this:

Blue + warm red = less saturated purple

Blue + cool red = more saturated purple

This is because the cool red sits closer to the blue than the warm red. The warm red sits closer to orange. Orange and blue are complements, which means they’d gray each other down.

This is why knowing if your pigments are generally warmer or cooler can really make a difference in your color mixing. If you keep mixing colors that are duller than you want, check your pigments on a color wheel. Make sure those two primaries CAN mix a bright secondary or tertiary. Because sometimes they just can’t.