Color mixing chart

Caylakas

Does anyone have any sort of chart or table that lists what colors to mix for specific circumstances? For example, what are the colors mixed for mountains? What colors are mixed together for distant trees? What colors are mixed together for closer trees? What color should be mixed for rocks, boulders, and cliffs? I suppose I could watch every Bob Ross video and start writing down this information but if it already exists somewhere, I would love to not duplicate efforts. Also, Bob talks occasionally about not using the paints straight out of the tube but they should be mixed. I never really understood that. If you need brown for riverbank or a boulder, why not just use brown? Why do you have to mix a bunch of colors together to get brown if you already have it in a tube? Anyway, any assistance with the color mixing would be appreciated.

Sunnylady

Caylakas There is nothing wrong to use color from the tube if it is exactly the color you want. The practicality ($$$) comes into the picture quite fast as you cannot have each and every color that one may need to execute a nice landscape. This is very important for green color shades in the landscape and mastering greens show the level of the artist. I suggest to do this exercise that i explained in one of my articles. Please kindly see the link https://www.twoinchbrush.com/articles/colors-mixing-exercise
I advise from all my heart to do this exercise as early as possible on artist's path, I regret that I waited so long and it slowed down my progress. Also everybody has their own brand of paints that may behave different and doing such matrix will set a wonderful base for a new artists and will allow them to be more free and start taking decisions on what to do earlier than just following the video lesson. (this is another thing where I was a slow learner before i started venturing on my own). So look at how fast you learn in general and see what approach will work for you. Painting with oil is a bit overwhelming in the beginning but doing combination of things from videos and your own trials will set you for more success than videos alone.

Jeffth

I don't have any concrete answers, but I'd love to participate in this conversation. I can offer what I've picked up from watching countless episodes of The Joy of Painting: for mountains, Bob almost always mixes blue, black, brown, and alizarin crimson (sometimes without the crimson). For evergreens, it's the same but without crimson and with green unless it's a winter scene (no green snow allowed haha). I've actually seen a Bob Ross 'Mountain Mix' tube of paint for sale, but that seems a little unnecessary in my opinion.

When it comes to why to not use a color straight from the tube, the answer probably stems from color theory. I'm really a novice when it comes to this, so I'd really like to hear others' take on this, but my basic understanding is that things that are farther away are lighter, cooler (bluer?), and less saturated (greyer?). Generally speaking, colors straight from the tube are too pure to appear realistic. Regarding brown, Bob sometimes does use pure van dyke for banks and trees in the foreground, but then highlights them, so it ends up not really being pure brown anyway. I wish I could do more than speculate, so I apologize if this isn't helpful: maybe mixing a black or a brown or purple instead of what comes out of the tube, has to do with how it interacts with other colors/blending with the liquid white? I hope we hear from someone with more knowledge on the subject, thank you for indulging my ramblings!

It would be really cool if there were some sort of cheat-sheet for some of the most common situations/elements.

Sunnylady

Jeffth You are on the right way of thinking in terms of realistic landscapes colors. Realistic colors are always muddier (this is what Bob tries to avoid in his videos). So to create a working realistic painting - a lot of mud colors need to be used and only accents can be made with pure colors (if you have them in the tube). Let me share link with you where I gave few references to one of our friends here and you can read those sources and understand a bit more about realism as it looks like you are willing to move to realism. https://www.twoinchbrush.com/originals/MHK/reflective-mountain

Caylakas

Sunnylady I keep trying to open the link you sent but it just keeps bringing me back to this conversation. Can you help me with this?

Sunnylady

Caylakas please copy it to the browser and click enter

Jeffth

Sunnylady do you have any guesses on why Bob (or anyone) would mix to create black when they have a pile of black on their palette already?

Jeffth

thank you for this! That book looks helpful. Hopefully one day I'll get around to doing a mixing exercise with the colors I have. In the school of Bob, though, there really could be a small 'cheat-sheet' for his most common mixes, since he uses some mixes so regularly.

Sunnylady

Jeffth when I looked into Bobs black and we discussed it with folks here we figured out that bobs black is a mix of alizarin and phtalo green ( at least those pigments mentioned on the tube). This produce deep purple dark color and you can see it when adding a bit of white to it.
There may be two reasons why Bob mixed his dark on the pallet:

Alter that purple shade a bit to his desire
Consume the dark colors from the pallet

as far as I recall that black in the tube was produced not from the beginning of the shows but later in the shows when he might have tired to mix it every time. But I am not the right person to judge timeline.

You probably heard by now that usually black that made from black pigments (PBk). They behave totally different when mixed with colors and they require more control as they are often overpowering everything.

Sunnylady

Jeffth search on internet about chromatic black, that will help you to understand a bit more of different approaches.