Mixing greys

There was some discussion in the comments of yesterday’s post about mixing greys so I thought I’d do a little test today.

In the first little sketch (this is done on a 5″ x 7″ sheet of Fabriano cold press) I mixed my sky colour starting with Payne’s gray and then added some other colours to tint the wash. Payne’s grey is very dark and has to be diluted quite a bit to lighten it. I added some ultramarine because the clouds are very blue/purple today, and then a little bit of Alizarin. The mix of cool colours is pretty flat, I find.

This second test is on the same paper but this time the sky mix is one of my usual grey recipes: ultramarine and burnt sienna, with a bit of alizarin. A mix of the warm and cool colour makes a more interesting grey, in my opinion, one with more modulations in it and much more complexity. There are probably at least a dozen more ways I could mix greys with the colours I currently have on my travel palette so this is just one little experiment to do on a cloudy day with not much time to spend painting.