How to Mix Browns: Two-Colour Mixing

Mixing browns often confuses people because brown is not a color in that it does not appear on the Color Wheel. However, once you understand that 'brown' is just a shade of orange, how to mix it becomes a lot clearer, especially with two-color mixing.

In this demonstration, I also use a more restricted palette that the full 18 color palette that I normally use, and you will see the advantages (reduced cost) and disadvantages (more variable mixes) of doing this.

I start with palette based on Monet's of:
- cadmium yellow
- cadmium orange
- vermilion
- rose madder (for alizarin crimson)
- cobalt violet
- french ultramarine blue
- cobalt blue
- emerald green
- viridian green

I then mix a further three hues from these:
- yellow-green (from cadmium yellow and emerald green)
- yellow-orange (from cadmium orange and cadmium yellow)
- blue-green (from cobalt blue and viridian green)
giving me 12 colors in all.

Then, using cadmium orange as the 'target' color, I apply the rules of two-color mixing to mix a wide variety of browns by pairing colors from either side of the Color Line. Mixes you will see include:

0:00 Setting out the palette
1:55 Intro to mixing browns
4:07 Mix 1: yellow-green and vermilion
6:20 Mix 2: yellow-orange and cobalt violet
8:09 Mix 3: ultramarine blue and yellow-orange
10:47 Mix 4: cadmium red and green-blue
11:25 Mix 5: vermilion and emerald green
12:15 Mix 6: yellow-orange and viridian green
(and as a bonus mix, one I forgot to include was rose madder and yellow-green)

At some points you will see me adding the cadmium orange hue itself to a mix just to enrich the mix where the pigments in the paints I'm using have slightly muddied the color.

I hope you enjoy this, and as always if you have any questions or observations, please drop them into the comments which I always keep an eye on. And please don't forget to subscribe!