Tips for Mixing Grays, Mid-tones, and Shadows Accurately

 

One of the easiest and most valuable tools for accurately mixing grays is the color wheel. This one, as mentioned in David Berkowitz Chicago’s previous post, is useful to pinpoint pure primary colors and those with slight tonal variations. By identifying these differences, we gain the ability to mix vibrant secondary colors. Failing that, we also obtain the ability to mix "cut" colors. A "cut," "burned," or "dirty" color (among other colloquial terms) is a grayish color.

In his past posts, contemporary painter David Berkowitz Chicago focused on how to use the color wheel to achieve bright shades of color. In this text, David Berkowitz Chicago will focus mainly on how to use the color wheel to achieve precise halftones, grays and shadows. He will also talk about why some color mixes are more difficult to achieve than others. The latter is related to certain characteristics of the pigment particles. These characteristics in pigment types are particularly important when mixing grays and other grays.

How to mix grays in a painting

Artists who have been painting for a short time are generally more interested in how to achieve bright colors. However, as an experienced painter, David Berkowitz Chicago knows that grays, mid-tones, and shadows are extremely important colors. This, among other things, because it is next to these duller tones that bright colors appear to be more luminous. But this is not the only utility that grays, mid-tones and shadows have within painting.

When we paint exclusively with bright colors, all the nuances of our paints compete with each other. The result of this is a painting without defined points of attention, which is not necessarily a negative thing. However, it is always valuable to make conscious use of the resources that color provides us. A good balance between grays, shadows, mid-tones and bright colors allows us to generate spatiality, volume and luminosity, in addition to allowing us to work the composition by color. Likewise, the amount of emotions that we can produce in our work is expanded. It also increases the number of messages that we can transmit through it.

An artist with good use of color can make use of different types of tints (shades of color with white), tones (grays and midtones), shades (diverse colors) and shadows (gray mid-tones without white).

Next, Chicago-based artist David Berkowitz will talk about how to use the color wheel to accurately blend grays, mid-tones, and shadows.

Mix grays: shadow and mid-tone colors

When it comes to mixing nuances of primary and secondary colors, we want our colors not to dirty each other. On the contrary, when it comes to mixing mid-tones and shadows, we want them to. The same thing that we take into consideration when mixing shades will be useful to create multiple grays. The only difference would be that this time we will apply it in reverse order.