The Color Wheel and Color Mixing

Watercolor paint-mixing

Watercolor paint-mixing

Acrylic paint-mixing

Acrylic paint-mixing

Deborah Dougless

With Nancy Friedman and Nils Johnson using all liquid paints, especially for our Sonoran Desert Plants, two small groups that were socially distanced met on May 12 and were introduced to the color wheel. Participants learned about the primary, secondary, and tertiary relationships between colors. They also learned about hue—adding white to lighten a color; shade—adding black to darken a color; and tone—adding gray to decrease the brightness or intensity of a color.

Each group of participants, using watercolor and acrylic, were then shown how to mix paint colors to find similarities to the cactus pads and other Sonoran plants brought in.