Art & Music

#59 · Mix paint on a palette

Blend two colours together on a palette without reaching for a brush. Keeps your good brushes clean and pristine.

Mixing colour with a brush is how most people start and it is the reason their colours go muddy. A chopstick keeps the brush out of the mixing entirely, which is a bigger improvement than it sounds.

How to do it

1. Lay your colours out around the edge of the palette with space in the middle.
2. Drag small amounts of two colours into the centre with the chopstick tip.
3. Add the darker colour to the lighter one, a little at a time - never the reverse.
4. Mix until the streaks disappear completely, then wipe the chopstick before the next mix.

Why it works

A brush holds paint deep in the ferrule and releases it gradually, so every mix is contaminated by the last two or three. Over a session that averages everything towards grey-brown. A chopstick holds almost nothing and wipes clean in a second, so each mix starts from where you think it does.

Tips & warnings

• Dark into light, always. It takes a speck of black to shift white and a great deal of white to rescue black.
• Unlacquered wood for oils - lacquer softens in solvent and flakes into the paint.
• Rags with oil paint and solvent on them can self-heat. Dry them flat outdoors before binning, never screwed up in a pile.