How to Avoid Mixing Muddy Colors

Lord Frederic Leighton, "Cymon and Iphigenia," 1884

Keeping your colors crisp and bright, even when painting with a more subdued tone, can be difficult and frustrating for any artist at any stage. Below are some tips on how to avoid muddy color mixtures:

1. Limit Color Mixtures to Two or Three Pigments

Adding more than two or three pigments (excluding black and white) into a mixture can cause paints to grow dull and muddy. If you find that you are using more than three pigments, pause and reconsider your approach. You may need to go and purchase a different pigment.

Black and white, though, are not included in the two-to-three limitation as they change the value of the mixture and have less of an effect on the core color.

2. Avoid Using Cheap Paints 

Cheap, or student grade paints are full of fillers. When mixed together the amount of filler will overwhelm the amount of pigment and create mud.

3. Avoid Mixing Compliments

A perfect complimentary mixture, say of yellow and purple, will create gray. An imperfect complimentary mixture, say of a slight greenish-yellow and purple, will create brown. It is almost impossible to find a perfect compliment with paints straight out of a tube. Because of this, avoid mixing compliments.

4. Avoid Over Mixing 

When mixing a color combination on your palette, do not blend the mixture into a perfect uniform blob. This will cause the paint to lose some of its light and vibrance. Instead, when mixing, do not over mix. Allow the mixture to finish mixing while being painted onto your canvas.

5. Use Both Mixtures and Straight Pigments 

While painting use both mixtures and paint straight out of the tube. This will help colors to appear bright.

6. Maintain a Light Color and a Dark Color Paint Brush 

While painting use one paintbrush only for light areas, and another only for dark. It can take some time to get used to switching back and forth between your two brushes (in fact, I am always messing up), but it is worth trying. This will help keep your darks dark and your brights bright.

I usually have three brushes: one for lights, one for darks, and one for mid-tones.

7. Use a Clean Brush for Blending 

Just as over mixing your colors can cause problems, so too can over blending with unclean brushes. If you want two sections of paint to blend, pick up a clean brush (fan or other), and blend the two colors with the clean brush and not with your used brushes. Not only will this make blending easier, but it will also limit the introduction of additional paint which can muddy your blend.

If you have any questions or tips that I did not think of for avoiding muddy colors, leave a comment! To read more tips about painting, check out my main Tips and Techniques page.