Brown. Such a simple word, but it means many colors - there are light and dark, warm and cold, reddish, greenish and bluish shades of brown. Most likely, you learned in kindergarten that if you mix red and green, you get brown, and that's true, but you can also mix blue and orange, and many other colors with the same result! Blending multiple colors together to make brown is easy, but getting a particular shade takes a certain level of skill. Follow the instructions in this article to learn how to mix paints to create a wide variety of brown shades.
Steps
Method 1 of 2: How to get brown using the color wheel
Step 1. Consider the color wheel
The color wheel represents the colors of the spectrum as a disk divided into colored sections in rainbow order. It lists the primary, secondary and secondary colors. The primary colors are red, blue, and yellow, while the secondary colors are orange, green, and purple. Secondary colors are located on the color wheel between the primary and secondary colors.
Step 2. Mix the primary colors together
The first and main way to get brown is to mix all three primary colors. This means that you need to use a palette knife (a special spatula with a curved handle) to mix blue, yellow and red paints until you get the dirty brown color you want. It is not necessary to use the same amount of each paint; add different amounts of paint for each color, and the result is a slightly different shade of brown paint each time.
Step 3. Mix complementary colors together
If you look at the color wheel, the complementary colors on it are located directly opposite each other. The primary-secondary color pairs are thus blue and orange, red and green, yellow and purple. By mixing colors in any of these pairs, you will end up with shades of brown that are slightly different from each other.
Step 4. Lighten or darken the shade of your brown paint
Add black or white paint to brown for a darker or lighter shade. You can also add a little more of the darkest paint you mixed to make it brown, but in this case, the shade will not only become darker, but also slightly different in color. If you want a very light shade of brown, it will be easier to add a small amount of brown that you have already mixed to a large amount of light paint. Making a light color darker is much easier than vice versa.
Step 5. Make the color less or more saturated
To make the brown even brighter, add more colors of the same colors that you used during the mixing. To make the color dull, it is enough to add a gray paint of an average brightness to it.
Step 6. Change the shade of the paint
If your shade of brown comes from a mixture of blue and orange paint, you can change the shade slightly by adding paints of other colors. For example, to get a warmer shade of brown, add red paint, and to get a dark and gloomy shade, you can add purple or green. Remember that the pairs of primary and secondary colors that you start to mix the shade you want can be changed by adding as many other colors to the mix as you like. Add auxiliary colors for more subtle hues.
Method 2 of 2: How to get brown with the Pantone Color Atlas
Step 1. Find a Pantone Color Atlas
This atlas was originally used in the printing industry, but it has very accurate color matches and you should be able to find the exact shade of brown you want. You can buy a new atlas or find one that is used online.
It is important to know here that the Pantone Atlas colors are given in CMYK, not RGY. CMYK is an English acronym for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. White is not included in this scheme, since it is mainly on paper of this color that printing is carried out, so you will have to adapt the atlas a little for yourself
Step 2. Find the desired shade of brown
There are many flower cards here, so be patient. You can also use Photoshop or other graphics editors, which often have a Pantone color atlas in various formats.
- You need to mix exactly as many parts of magenta, yellow, cyan and black as needed for the selected shade. Note that in this example the colors are mixed in the following proportions: 33 parts cyan, 51 parts magenta, and 50 parts yellow.
- Keep in mind that magenta, yellow, and cyan are more accurate hues to match the base colors of the color spectrum, but they are not a generally accepted standard for color mixing in this article. Read this article to find out more.
Step 3. Mix paints
In the proportions you found in the Pantone Color Atlas, mix the colors to achieve exactly the brown shade you want. Although this atlas is commonly used for mixing ink for printing, you can also mix magenta, cyan, black, and yellow to create your ideal shade of brown.
Advice
- Even if you have brown paint, you can still mix it with other paint colors to get the shade you want.
- Until you measure the ratio of the parts of the colors you used to make brown, you won't get exactly the same shade a second time. If you know that you will need this color after a while, mix a large amount of paint of the desired shade at once so that it does not run out at the most inopportune moment.
- Make sure to wash your brush before you start mixing the desired color, otherwise you will inadvertently add other colors and ruin the final result.
- Add black paint only if necessary and in small portions until the desired shade is obtained.
- If you need a lighter shade of a color, just add a little white paint, and if you need a darker shade, add a little black.