Mixing Watercolour Grays & Black with Convenient Colours (Part 1)

This article is to accompany my Youtube video.

When I first started using watercolours, I had difficulty mixing grays and blacks. In the early days, I used Payne's Gray, the black that came with standard watercolour box sets and occasionally mixed graphite with watercolour.

What I learned over the years is, you can get better grays and blacks if you mix them yourself. By better, I mean grays and blacks that look more interesting when compared to single pigment grays and blacks, such as graphite or Ivory Black for example.

Just like you should avoid using colours straight from the tube or pan without first mixing it somehow, the same applies to grays and blacks. No colour or pigment in nature appear in their natural pure state. There's always some sort of impurities, no matter how minute. When you use single pigment grays and blacks with colours, the grays and blacks will attract attention in a wrong way. You can try it yourself by painting two versions of the same subject, and using single pigment grays and blacks (e.g. watersoluble graphite, Ivory Black, Lamp Black) for one version, and mixed grays and blacks for another. The visual different will be easy to spot.

How to get grays and blacks with watercolour

You may already know that to get grays and blacks, you can mix the three primaries yellow, red and blue together. But which primaries specifically? That really requires a lot of experimentation. For me, I prefer to mix the grays and black with convenient colours, usually two instead of three colours. It's faster and easier.

When you mix three colours, you have to be precise on the amount of each colour mixed. When you have too much of one colour, such as red and yellow, you'll get more of a brownish mixture.

When you have too much red and blue, your mixture will tend towards the violet side.

Not all colours can mix to a nice gray or black. Use the wrong starting colours and you can mix rather quickly into mud.

My common mixtures are:

• Phthalo Green + Permanent Alizarin Crimson
• French Ultramarine + Burnt Sienna
• Transparent Pyrrole Red + Phthalo Blue

You don't have to use the same colours I've mentioned. As long as the formula is something like the ones below, you'll be able to get a variation of gray and black.

• Cool Green + Cool Red
• Warm Blue + Orange
• Warm Red + Cool Blue

For the first two mixtures of Cool Green + Cool Red and Warm Blue + Orange, you're actually mixing complement colour pairs. Each colour will neutralize and result in a gray. Mix more paint and you'll get a dark intense colour close to black.

For the last mixture of Warm Red + Cool Blue, you can get an intense almost black colour as well. Mixing red and blue usually give you a purple or violet but in this case, the Warm Red has a bit of yellow, so you get red, yellow and blue which will give you a muted colour. Throw in a strong Phthalo Blue and you can get something really dark. Mix in a bit of yellow and you'll get something close to black (such as what you see at the bottom left above).

Add more water to the blacks and you'll get the grays.

What's a nice black or gray?

To me, a nice black or gray is one that allows you the see the underlying colours that were used in the mixture. If you mix the colours thoroughly on the palette before applying to paper, the grays and black will not be as interesting as when compared to those where you did not mix cleaning.

In the two sketches above, I prefer the grays and blacks mixed with two colours rather than the ones from single pigments, e.g. Ivory Black and graphite.

Payne's Gray is still quite alright. It's consist of three pigments. I used it sometimes, but mostly for monotone sketches.

Graphite when used with watercolour will look lifeless and dull, as if colours have been sucked out from it.

Ivory Black in the sketch looks alright, but you definitely get more visual interested when you use a black that's mixed from two colours.

What about grays and blacks from three primaries?

While I prefer the convenient mixtures, I do mixed grays and blacks from three primaries.

Also when you mix grays and blacks yourself, you can control whether they go towards the cool or warm side. E.g. If I mixed Phthalo Blue and Transparent Pyrrole Orange, I can add more blue to make the gray cool, or more of the latter to make the gray warmer.

The colours I used will be those that are already used in my sketch. If I have Perm Alizarin Crimson, I might get my grays and blacks by mixing with Phthalo Green. If there's French Ultramarine used, I would use Burnt Sienna. I try not to introduce or use too many colours because it can be quite difficult to achieve colour harmony.

Two books you should check out to learn more about colour mixing would be Confident Color: An Artist's Guide To Harmony, Contrast And Unity and https://www.parkablogs.com/content/book-review-making-color-sing-practical-lessons-color-and-design-25th-anniversary-edition