Friday, 21 August 2015

2 - Mixing with Burnt Sienna


Part 2 of a series of posts about mixing with my Ultimate Mixing Palette colours. 

Burnt Sienna comes in a huge range of hues. I have posted about many of them here and more can be seen on my website in the Painted Watercolour swatches section here

Burnt Sienna is a neutralised orange. It is a wonderful colour to have in your palette as a mixing colour. It speeds up the creation of other colours, especially grey mixes with blues, as you would otherwise have to mix a yellow and a red and then to blue to create a grey. Even in a very limited palette of a single red, yellow and blue, Burnt Sienna is an excellent 4th colour addition.

While Burnt Sienna is available in a options from a burnt orange to a burnt umber hue and is made from a range of pigments and pigment mixes, I prefer the earthy PBr7 Burnt Sienna (Daniel Smith, though Da Vinci and M.Graham are very similar in colour) as I find it useful as a convenient skin colour when washed out with lots of water as well as being a great earthy warm brown in landscape work. It is also the perfect mixing partner with Ultramarine to make my Jane's Grey - a convenient dark shadow colour that also acts as a neutral tint for the other colours, without introducing a deadening black pigment. To see some of the alternative pigments I tried, have a look here.

Here is Daniel Smith Burnt Sienna mixed with 13 of my Ultimate Mixing Palette colours. It creates yellow ochre and raw sienna hues with the yellows, burnt scarlet and brown madder hues with the reds, wonderful greys and deep blues and browns with the blues and a range of other browns with Raw Umber and Goethite. With Phthalo Green it creates lovely pine greens and with Buff titanium create flesh-tones. 




To see more mixing charts with these and many more colours see the Watercolour Mixing Charts tab on my website. These charts are also available in book or eBook form.

For the full range of colour mixes that can be created with my Ultimate Mixing Set of colours, see my book The Ultimate Mixing Palette; a World of colours. Both books are available through blurb.com as physical or eBooks here.


9 comments:

  1. "... Even in a very limited palette of a single red, yellow and blue, Burnt Umber is an excellent 4th colour addition..."
    You probably meant Burnt Sienna.

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  2. so wonderful to see your color charts.
    eye candy indeed.

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    1. Thank you Tammie - there are a lot more to come if people are interested.

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  3. Just when I think I'm getting caught up with mixing charts from your tutorial lessons, you start posting this wonderful series! I love the idea of focusing on one pigment and showing its mixing possibilities in a single wheel, where I can see the mixing relationships with other colors in my palette at a glance. Looks like I'll be cutting myself a new template!

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    1. I'll be adding a Buff Titanium 'wheel chart' and a Raw Umber one though I have many others. It was a great way to test different colours when I was coming up with my ultimate mixing set.

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  4. Have always loved this color, even as a young girl just learning to paint. It's amazing to see all the variations here, when using your Daniel Smith Burnt Sienna. Even the name, "Burnt Sienna," is interesting!

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    1. If I have a favourite colour, it is orange in all it's forms - bright, burnt, burnt sienna, burnt umber. I love how all of the oranges mix with various blues and the incredible range of colours those pairs creates. I work with the red/green opposites at times and the yellow/purple pair occasionally but the orange/blue is in nearly all I do.

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  5. Hi Jane, I love exploring the endless gems in your blog! I'd love to see how you create these colour mixing charts on you YouTube if you're ever looking for ideas ❤️

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