I’m Russell, although a semi-serious artist of about 15 years I’ve started to get interested in how you can apply different painting techniques to give a better PBN experience.
There have been several posts recently about where you can get additional PBN paint sets when you run out of paint. If you can’t get additional paint sets then you can mix your own paint. There are several on-line tools that can help you with this and I have written a blog post about it here. Please read and enjoy.
We are going to use a web-based paint colour mixing programme provided by a paint company called “Golden”. You can use it from your phone, but I prefer to use a tablet or PC. Basically, you use a cursor to choose a point of colour on an image or colour, and the Paint Mixer will tell you what colours you need to mix, and the proportions you use to make that colour.
Do make sure that you read the instructions first please.
First Of All
First, have a look on the box and you might find somewhere, a website that gives you contact details for the manufacturer. Email them to explain the situation, with the name of the PBN set and ask if they do additional paint sets. If they do, then you can buy one, but it will probably be expensive. If they don’t, there are some other things you can do.
How Many Colours In Your Set?
When you look at your paint set you could have up to 64 colours depending on the PBN pack you bought. You will see that you don’t have 64 colours, but you have several different shades (lighter and darker) of the same colour. You might just have 8 recognisable different colours. Buy a small tube of TITANIUM WHITE paint, and a small tube of MARS BLACK paint. Add a very LITTLE white to a darker shade of the empty colour to make it lighter or a very LITTLE black to a lighter shade to make it darker. To make a colour darker though, you should really add a LITTLE colour on the opposite side of the colour wheel to the colour you want to darken, as black greys a colour down. When I say LITTLE, I mean LITTLE.
Technology Calls
If that doesn’t work, you must mix some colour using paint from tubes. You can buy sets of 12 or 24 paint colours that come in small tubes about 12ml (1/4oz) in size. These tubes are named with proper artist paint names – Cerulean Blue, Prussian Blue, Sap Green etc. Don’t buy the cheapest, in fact NEVER buy the cheapest. I recommend the Mozart set of 24 colours and you can find these on Amazon. You could also buy small sets of other makes of paint in your local art store that will probably larger tubes in it.
You will also need some proper art paper such as acrylic paper, canvas paper or even better canvas sheet (which is canvas cut into small sheets) that you can buy in pads from an art store.
Get your art paper, With the last of your PBN paint colour paint a square about 25mm (1inch) on the paper. Paint one layer, let it dry then paint another layer to give it a full colour. When it has dried, scan it into your computer, or take a high-quality photograph of the square on your phone. The file needs to be either a .PNG or a .JPG. Email the photograph to your computer – you can use your mobile phone though.
Introducing Golden Artists Colours
Go to the web site of the Golden Paint Company https://goldenartistcolors.com/
Click on the “Resources” menu item and hover your cursor over “Paint Mixers”. When the options come up choose “Paint Mixer Intro”, these are the instructions on how to use the Golden Paint Mixer. “Acrylic Paint Mixer (New)”. Read the instructions.
To cut a long story short, you choose the paint colour that you scanned or photographed earlier, and the “Paint Mixer” will tell you what colours of paint you need to mix together to reproduce the colour you have run out of.
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