When I started painting, I owned fourteen tubes of watercolour and somehow couldn't mix the grey I wanted. Now I own eight. The palette got smaller. The mixing got better. That's not a coincidence.
Why Fewer Colours Mix Better
Watercolour pigments are semi-transparent. When you mix three pigments together, each one is fighting the others for visual dominance. The more pigments you pile in, the more you trend toward muddy brown-grey — not because you're doing anything wrong, but because that's what mixed pigments do.
The cleanest mixes come from two colours. Sometimes three, if one is very dilute. This is why a limited palette — six to eight colours — produces cleaner, more harmonious work than a palette of twenty.
The Six Colours I Actually Use
My working palette for landscapes:
- French Ultramarine — the workhorse blue. Granulates beautifully. Makes purples with Quinacridone Magenta, rich darks with Burnt Sienna.
- Cerulean Blue — clean sky blue, won't go purple. Use it where you want clear, cool light.
- Quinacridone Magenta — the most versatile pink. Mixes to clean violets, warm reds, and surprisingly subtle flesh tones.
- New Gamboge — a warm yellow that leans orange. Greens made from this feel warm and natural rather than acidic.
- Lemon Yellow (Hansa) — a cool, slightly acid yellow. Mixes cooler, cleaner greens. Also useful for early morning light.
- Burnt Sienna — the most useful brown on earth. Mixed with Ultramarine it makes a full range of greys and darks. On its own it's the colour of brick, autumn leaves, warm shadows.
That's it. Six colours. You can mix almost anything from these six if you understand temperature and pigment bias.
Colour Temperature: The Most Important Concept in Mixing
Every colour has a temperature bias — it leans warm (toward orange/yellow) or cool (toward blue/green). This matters enormously when mixing.
The rule: if you mix a warm and a cool version of the same hue, you get cleaner results than mixing two colours that both lean the same way.
Example: Ultramarine (warm blue, leans violet) + Lemon Yellow (cool yellow, leans green) = a cooler, slightly grey-green.
Ultramarine + New Gamboge (warm yellow) = a warmer, richer olive green.
Neither is right or wrong. But knowing which you're reaching for — warm or cool — is the difference between accidentally muddy and intentionally subtle.
How to Mix Clean Greens
This is the question I get asked most at workshops. Watercolour tube greens (Viridian, Sap Green, Hooker's) are useful but rigid — they go everywhere at full strength. Mixing your own greens gives you control.
Starting point: Yellow + Blue. Then adjust:
- More yellow → lighter, more spring-like
- More blue → darker, colder, receding
- Add a touch of Burnt Sienna → immediately more natural, less raw
- Use Cerulean not Ultramarine → cleaner, cooler green (Ultramarine greens tend toward khaki)
The greens in my landscapes are almost never straight from a tube. They're always mixed — often from three colours — because nature's greens are complex and varied.
How to Mix Greys Without a Grey Tube
Payne's Grey is a fine colour but it deadens everything it touches. I haven't used it in years.
Ultramarine + Burnt Sienna, in varying ratios, gives you a complete range of warm-to-cool greys:
- More Ultramarine → cool, bluish grey (perfect for shadow in clear light)
- Equal parts → neutral grey, very useful for overcast skies
- More Burnt Sienna → warm grey, like weathered wood or old stone
These mixed greys also harmonise naturally with the rest of your palette — because they're built from colours already in your painting.
The Muddy Colour Problem
Muddy colour usually has one of three causes:
- Too many pigments — more than three in one mix
- Mixing on a dirty palette — old dry paint contaminating fresh mixes
- Overworking a wet wash — going back into a drying wash disturbs the pigment particles and creates irregular dark edges and muddy patches
The fix for all three is the same: patience and discipline. Mix on a clean part of your palette. Use two colours. Let washes dry before adding another layer.
A Practical Mixing Exercise
Take your six colours and make every possible two-colour combination on a test sheet. Label each one. You'll end up with something like fifteen swatches — and you'll know, from direct experience, exactly what each pair produces. That knowledge is worth more than any colour theory lecture.
I did this exercise when I first reduced my palette. It took an afternoon. It completely changed how I mixed.
One More Thing
Buy artist-quality, not student-quality, if you possibly can. Student paints use less pigment and more filler. The colours are duller, they granulate less beautifully, and they mix differently. Winsor & Newton Professional and Daniel Smith are the benchmarks I use. Six artist-quality colours will serve you better than fourteen student ones.
If you want to practise colour mixing in a structured, supportive environment, that's exactly what my workshops are for — see current workshop dates here.
