Paintings By Kirsten Elizabeth Gilmore Studio Blog

Color Planning with Swatches:

Mixing primaries, tints, and shades

Your goal for this DIY acrylic painting tutorial is to mix, test, and choose two colors that go with your base coat color. Then, you will mix a tint and a shade of each of these colors to give your piece a range of values.

Materials:

• small strips of paper or paper pad
• pencil with eraser
• primary colors of acrylic paint
• palette knife 
• preferably diamond shape, flexible metal

Here's a photo of my favorite painting knife.

• small, flat brush of any kind
• plastic palette or baker’s parchment paper 
• The parchment acts as instant disposable palette. 
• Avoid using a paper plate—those soak up the paint too much.
• Airtight plastic container 



• with enough room for your knife to comfortably scrape the bottom (such as Rubbermaid's long, low container).

Procedure: 

1. Add small amounts of red, yellow or blue to the palette. Only mix two colors at a time. Mix thoroughly with the side of the knife, in a scooping and squishing motion until no streaks of color remain.                                 
2. When you find a color you like. Stop, and wipe off the knife.
3. Write color recipe on the back of a scrap of paper.
4. Using your flat brush, make a paint swatch on the front of that scrap on the very center of the paper strip.                                                
5. Keep making color scraps until you have found two you like that go with your base coat color and with each other.
6. Scoop up half of the mixed color you with your palette knife, and put it inside of the airtight plastic container. Close the lid tightly. 
7. Mix the other half with a dime sized dab of white. Mark the strip with this new color just to the right of the original.
8. Add more white paint until you get a significantly lighter tint of your color. Mark the strip of paper to the right of the last swatch.
9. Store this tint in your plastic tub.                                              
10. Clean your knife.
11. Scoop out the original color from your tub onto the palette.
12. Repeat the process to create shades, only this time, add a little drop of black each time. Black is potent, so you only need a small pea-sized drop at a time. 
13. Paint these color swatches to the left of your main (central) color.                           
14. Repeat steps 1-13 with two other colors mixed together.              
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16. You should end up with two strips full of tints and shades and a recipe for each original color in the back.