Color Mixing with Acrylics – Color Bias

About the Artist

I’m Will Kemp, I’m an award-winning professional artist and teacher.

Prior to painting full time I’ve worked in Museums, taught in schools, set up and ran my own gallery for 5 years and have taught hundreds of people to paint and draw.

I’ve studied Classical atelier techniques in Italy alongside conceptual art at the Tate Gallery, London.

I’ve painted in watercolours, acrylics and oils and my styles have ranged from abstract; impressionistic to realistic portraiture in order to realise my own personal style.

I’ll teach you to become selective with composition, demystify colour mixing, achieve perfect perspective, and see the benefits of dramatic use of contra
st.

I’m looking forward to you joining me on your creative journey of discovery

I really hope you enjoy this free video from Will.  Will has more great lessons and resources on his website. I highly recommend that you visit today.

Here is the link:

www.willkempartschool.com

Be sure to check out his Art Courses as well.  These can be accessed from the navigation menu on top of his site.  From there, for a very reasonable fee, you can get instant access to some of his more in depth courses.  Money well spent!

In the short video below, Will will demonstrate and explain color bias with acrylic colors. I have provided a word for word transcript of the video demonstration below. I hope you enjoy.

If you are looking for a more in depth study on mixing colors using Acrylic Paint, then you should definitely consider investing in Wills course on color mixing.  It’s a downloadable course that consists of 7 videos with over 4 hours of expert tuition.  Click the banner below to learn more or follow this link.

Colour mixing basics – Acrylic Colour Bias

Good Morning class. Today we are going to look at color bias between two blues. Every color has a color bias towards one way or the other on the color wheel.

COLOR BIAS: Paint pigments have a color bias due to the chemical impurities within each pigment.

It is more difficult to see when you look at a color straight out of the tube in its mass tone.

Here we have Ultramarine and Thalo Blue as they appear straight from the tube. They look quite similar although Thalo Blue is a bit darker. When we start to add white to them though to create a tint, this is where you can really see which way the bias is on each pigment.

So now you can easily see how green the blue on the right is compared to the one on the left. This is just a very quick example of color bias.

ADDING YELLOW TO MAKE GREEN

Adding Cadmium Yellow Light

If we then wanted to mix a green between these, you will see the difference. Now you can see how the green on the right, the Thalo Blue, is a lot brighter, a lot cleaner green, even though initially when we look at the mass tones, the Thalo Blue looks a lot darker.

So you need to have a quick understanding of pigments to know how far you can push them or how you can create the tone that you are after. Sometimes you don’t have to add its compliments to done it down, you can just be using the wrong blue.