Colour Mixing - an app?

Recently I was chatting about how colours are mixed and wondered is there an easier way to demonstrate the proportions of colours being mixed. In this blog post I provide the app link and give my take on whether it is useful or not.

So what is colour mixing? When you add one colour to another you get a third colour (as a result of the two combining). Most people know that blue and yellow make green for example. When you learn how to paint, though this doesn’t always come out at the right green, I know that if you add a touch of red (being the primary left out) you can change the green to an olive green or a darker green depending on the yellow and blue and red. But this answer only goes half of the way - how much colour do you add to another?

When you are mixing colours from a tube, how much paint do you need to get a third colour? Is there a percentage amount of paint to make it easier? Until now there has been no real gauge, just a dash or red or more blue added is quite vague, so I decided to look to see if there was an app and there is!

The app is called Real Color Mixer and here is their description (available on app stores under the name Real Color Mixer)

Real Color Mixer simulates mixing real paints in different proportions.

https://apelgrim.com/real-color-mixer

Real Color Mixer simulates mixing real paints (for example oil or acrylic paints) in different proportions, making it possible to preview the newly created colors without actually mixing the physical paints.

Features:

• ability to define up to 12 colors for each palette

• ability to save up to 40 mixed colors for each palette

• possibility to copy the palette

• database of 430 predefine colors

• ability to set the texture and form of the brush

• create (from color picker, RGB or HTML color codes) and delete your own colors - only Android

• edit color name

• importing and exporting a palette

My view on the app?

Great for anyone who is new to colour mixing, just messing about with the basics of adding blue, yellow and red will give you interesting results. Try adding one colour to another and then perhaps progress to adding a third colour. This is what we do in class. Observe the percentages that make the colour, this may help a little when mixing colours with paint. Colour mixing comes after a while, with experience but it can be frustrating when you add too much of one colour and not enough of another.

There are many brilliant colour theory books you can also read but explaining how much colour to mix is a very tricky area, this app is an easy one to use and could be useful.

Looking at the colours provided in the app there is a slight problem for watercolourists and that the colours provided in the Real Color Mixer are ones we don’t usually use in class, but as a basis of general how to mix colours it will work fine for all levels of ability.

Try the app and share your thoughts!

Jane

On the App Store Real Color Mixer