SANDRA’S TOP COLOUR-MIXING TIPS

• Know the colours on your palette. Play with mixes to see how you can make the colours you’ll need for your painting. It doesn’t need to be neat, just useful.

• Practise mixing colours to match natural things like a leaf, stick, rock, flower petals. Put paint right on them. And lay clear plastic over a photo and paint on the plastic to match the colours in the photo.

• Many colours in nature are more subdued than you would expect. Use the complement to calm down too-bright hues.

• Cadmium lemon yellow and ivory black make useful greens for landscapes. Think of ivory black as a low chroma blue. It’s useful for cooling and lowering the chroma. You can mix your own black with ultramarine blue and burnt sienna.

• When you start your painting, use your brush to mix colours – especially when your painting is a small or medium size. Over-mixing with a palette knife can result in a less lively colour.

• Scoop up colour with just the tip of your brush and place it on your palette. Wipe the brush. Then scoop up any modifying colours the same way. Mix them together with the tip of the brush just until you see the resulting colour. Try not to get paint all the way into the ferrule.

• For variations of the colour you mixed, add a modifying colour just at the edge of the pile. You may need a warmer/cooler, lighter/darker, or brighter/duller version.

• As you paint, lay a stroke and, before the next stroke, think of how the colour may need to be adjusted. If the colour isn’t right, don’t keep painting with it.

• Keep each colour family in its own area of your palette.

• If your palette gets messy, take your palette knife and arrange all your mixes by colour family. Clean an area for mixing.