Hi, I'm Nancy Rainer. Thank you for joining me for this video, where we will learn how to mix and match color. I think color matching is so much fun. It's a major part of my painting. And it helps resolve issues. And it also adds visual interest to my painting.

I don't think I could live without it. It's my number one tool. And this whole video is one section of my new book called create perfect paintings. I want to show you a couple of examples of why I think mixing color is so important. Let's look at this painting. Here's a painting in process that I already started.

And it's a nice tropical seen tropical landscape. But if we look at the bottom here, there's a lot of repetition. There are many, many red flowers that are very similar. It kind of gets jammed up at the bottom. What I want to do in this painting is create a sense of space breathability and right down here It feels too dense. So My solution would be to get rid of or remove some of these red flowers.

Not all I liked them, but there's just too many. So how would I do that? How do I remove some flowers? Well, the first thing you might think of is white out and not real white out but taking white paint or primer, and just taking a brush and waiting it out. I would not recommend that and here's why. If I take white paint, and let's say I want to get rid of this flower first.

If I just put white paint on, now it stands out and it's a real distraction. It's not helping me to make this painting look better and more breathable. So that's not a good solution. And some of you might think, Well, how about sanding? I like sanding. But if you took some sandpaper and sanded that flower out, then you would have the same problem.

You'd have a distraction, there'd be a standard area there. The best solution for this is to mix and match the colors in the background. Behind the flower, as if the flower was suddenly removed with a magic wand, what would be there would be this dirt color. That's, that's right here behind on either side of the flower. So the best thing, I think to resolve this issue of removing this flower would be to match this brownish orange color behind. So I can and I'm going to do this pretty quickly because the rest of the video is going to show you exactly how to match a color Exactly.

But if I come kind of close, so here's an orange color. And so many times, it's we just want to take the shortcut and say, Oh, that's sort of close. It's not exact, but it's okay. If it's sort of close and not perfectly matched, it'll stand out just like the white glob or sanding that we talked about before. That's not a good solution. So again, what we really have to do to remove something in a painting is to match The exact color that we want it to be, and that would be that exact color.

So this color looks a little bright. I'm going to double it down a little bit. And while I'm matching the color, you may notice that I am using this whole array or most of it is not all of it, but I'm going to just put a little dot here to see it's close but not close enough. I'm going to still work on it until it gets perfect. And every time I add a little bit more color, I'm just going to put it down and see if it works. Nice little green.

It's a little more orange. color matching is very fun. I think one of my favorite parts of painting. Green. Once you know the ins and outs of color matching, you can do this pretty quickly. Now I'm mixing the color with a brush so that I can get kind of a dirty mix.

And there couldn't got most of it out. I'm going to start removing this flower here. And my background colors getting more orange. If it looks like I'm making it easy, and doing it too quickly, don't worry, it is easy. But all you need is this video and a lot of practice. And you could do it this fast too, but I'm not explaining what I'm doing because I'll be doing that in the rest of the video.

What I want to do is just show you how much we need to be able to match color Exactly. To remove and make things disappear like this. One benefit of matching color. Okay, so I'm gonna keep working on this and I'm going to start to remove a couple of other Here's the problem when you become a perfectionist, you still want to go at it a little bit. Okay, so I'm going to keep working on this and I'm going to remove a few more flowers. Now I finished removing several of the flowers in here.

Let's go back and compare this final piece, which I'm liking a lot better, there's a lot more breathability in the bottom, a lot more space doesn't feel all cramped up like wallpaper. And let's compare it to the original before I started making the corrections, and see the difference between the two. So, color matching gives us the one big important tool, which is that we can remove items that we've already painted. Let's look at another example. Let's say you were painting green grass in a realistic landscape. Or you were painting a green square in an abstract painting.

If I took greens straight out of the two piers permanent Green light right out of the tube, and just took green and painted either green grass, or green square, green square and a blob. Here's the green, it's very flat, and solid, one green, no variation in the color. It's a green square. not that interesting. But if I want to create a sense of space in my paintings, even in abstraction, I need to vary the color and varying the color will add much more visual interest to the painting. So how do I do that instead of taking a color straight up the tube, if I took this green color, and I made six variations.

So here's the color. I'm going to add white to one to make it lighter. later I'm going to add yellow to one to make it lighter and yellow are going to add blue to another make it a richer blue. I'll add the opposite of green. We'll get into that later to make it dollar a little lighter. In other words, I'm going to add a little black to one.

And I'll make this a little brighter here. They still look kind of similar, so I'm going to play with them a little more. So that I can get six greens that all look like they're part of a family, but each one different. So here I have, instead of one green out of the tubes looking the same, I have six different greens and while I paint this square I can start to vary the green. And I have all these options to use to make the square much more interesting, hopefully. So now here's the difference between the green squares.

One, it's a flat square, no sense of space in here. As soon as you try to vary your color, you can see the brushstrokes a little bit more because you have a variation in color. It's just much more interesting. Same thing with, say, green grass, I could still the same idea holds that if I change as I'm painting the grass, I keep changing the color. It looks much more interesting than the same color repeated over and over again. Creating a pattern.

Let's look at this in a painting. Here's the same situation, since we're talking about green squares and green grass, here is a painting by Gauguin. And let's look at the bottom here. This whole bottom foreground is the grassy hillside and go down obviously did not use green straight out of the tube. It's fascinating. It's what makes his work really interesting.

One of the aspects that makes this work interesting is having this variety of green and I photoshopped and altered it as if goggan used one tube of green and now we have a much more boring foreground. So if you look at the difference between these two, this one has much more variety and much more interest than this one where the color is very uniform.