When I paint, I physically mix the paints on the page. It's just the way it feels natural for me to paint.

However, the colours that are mixed have to be compatible. The mix needs to form a new, inbetween colour - as opposed to 'mud'.

"Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green" by Michael Wilcox is a great book about how not to make 'mud'.

This is the colour bias wheel he uses :-


And I've been doing something wrong.

I've been using cadmium yellow to mix with both my red (geranium) and green (chrome green).

It's a green-yellow, so it mixes nicely with the chrome green, but produces a yukky colour when mixed with the red. I needed another yellow that was biased towards the orange/red side of the wheel to mix with the red, rather than the green-yellow (cadmium yellow) that I've been using.

I was lifting the mix (mud) from the page on the red bits, realizing that I needed this other yellow. I got around to looking at this this morning.

I've added in an orange-yellow, which mixes nicely with the red (geranium) to produce a good orange/interim colour, rather than the mud I was getting.
Of course, when this orange-yellow is mixed with the green, it produces mud.

The orange-yellow I've used is Lemon Yellow.
The green-yellow I've used is Cadmium Yellow.

I've mixed each of the yellow with the red, and with the green to record the differences.

The way it looks on the screen, the colour mix of both the cadmium yellow and the lemon yellow with the chrome green look kind of muddy - but in real life, the cadmium yellow mixes nicely, and the lemon yellow produces mud.

The issue is illustrated more clearly with the mixes with the red.

The other mixes I do (with blue - ultramarine, and pink - azilirin tint) aren't a problem, coz they are with white.