How to Mix Vibrant Color

When I stand before a blank white canvas, my imagination begins filling it in with color. I see the world in hues of magenta, cobalt blue, and viridian green, and I want to capture these colors on canvas.

As an artist, I must narrow down the millions of shades of color my eyes see and simplify the landscape to a few dozen colors that create a cohesive and harmonious statement within the painting.

How Underpainting Affects the Finished Work

The first step to creating vibrant color is to apply an underpainting.

I cover my blank white canvas with a thin layer of oil paint. I use student-grade oil paints since they have less pigment and work better as a wash. I thin them out with Liquin, which gives a smooth painting surface and dries overnight.

I often get asked how I choose the color of my underpainting. I could paint the exact same painting on three different colors of underpainting, and I would end up with three very different finished works. A green underpainting makes oranges and reds pop, an orange underpainting makes blues pop, and a purple underpainting makes yellows pop. In other words, the chosen underpainting makes its complementary color more vibrant.

Coastal in Orange by Erin Hanson, 2023

If I want a coastal painting to simmer with the electric colors of the sunset, I will use a red or orange underpainting. If I want the same coastal image to peacefully drift between hues of turquoise and azure blue, I will use an underpainting color closer to blue on the color wheel, such as viridian green.

I often create an underpainting wash that changes color from warm to cool, which gives the painting a feeling of dynamic movement.

Coastal in Blue by Erin Hanson, 2023

Since I try not to overlap my brushstrokes when I paint, a lot of the underpainting ends up peeking out between my brushstrokes; as a result, the color I choose for the underpainting plays a big part in the overall effect of the work.

Pre-painting Work

Before I even pick up a brush, I form a clear picture in my mind of what I want the finished painting to look like. The more precise my intentions are before I begin painting, the easier it is to work, and my painting has that spontaneous, “loose and free” feeling that draws you right into the picture. Any given scene I decide to paint can be created on canvas in a dozen different ways, focusing on a dozen different color schemes and employing a dozen different compositional elements–a high horizon line, a low horizon line, sky one-third full of clouds, sky two-thirds full of clouds, high-contrast color, low-contrast color, tree on the right, tree on the left... you get the idea.

To solidify the composition in my mind, I create several pencil sketches with notes on color. Sometimes I will also paint a small, quick sketch on a 5x7 linen board.

How My Limited Palette Works

The next step is to mix my palette of colors. I work with a limited palette of only four or five pigments (the pigments themselves might change from painting to painting, but I often stick with these five primary hues: ultramarine blue, phthalo turquoise, permanent rose, cadmium scarlet, and cadmium yellow light.)

I spend an hour or so using a palette knife to mix every single color that I want to appear in the painting. I organize my expansive 24" palette by subject and location within the picture: I mix the cloud’s colors in one section of the palette; the mountain’s light and shadow colors, arranged from near to far, in another section; and the trees’ shadows and highlight colors, again arranged from near to far, in yet another section. (Closer trees are darker and more saturated; distant trees are lighter and bluer.)

By using the right limited palette, it is almost impossible to get muddy colors. I can blend piles of paint together without fear of creating colors that should only be seen stuck underneath your shoe.

I am always amazed at the variety of colors I can create with five simple pigments. Since these colors are on the outside of the color wheel, they are pure pigments with only one ingredient. This gives me a lot more control over my paint, and I can mix my own sap greens, Naples yellows, and red ochres.

When I was twelve years old, I had a job color mixing for a mural studio in La Cañada, California. The head artist would mix a tiny Dixie cup full of an exact hue and then ask me to make a half gallon of that precise color using the hundred or so gallons of acrylic paint in the studio.

I quickly learned that you could move a container of paint around on the color wheel as you please, adding more yellow to make it brighter, adding white to lighten it, adding a drop of cadmium red to make it warmer, adding a dash of blue to tone it down... and so on. In about thirty seconds, I can take my limited palette of five colors and match any color that appears in a photograph.

This is how I create the vibrant colors I see in nature. With each new picture, I continue to experiment with color to make my paintings more alive, more dynamic, and truer to the world of imagination I am creating.