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Lately in our workshops, I've been giving a lot of emphasis to learning to work with tube colors according to their potential. By potential I mean the visual contents of the tube color. 

We painters fall in love with certain brands of paint, with particular tube colors, even with other artists' palettes of colors.  We tend to get a bit dogmatic about certain colors such as alizarin, ultramarine blue, transparent red oxide and others. I plead guilty, myself.  

With more and more experience, we end up settling on choices we can depend upon to give us the results we want. And those choices end up being our palette of colors. That's our nature as painters, no matter our medium.

A few years back I began to wonder why it is so difficult to get students to connect to the color wheel as a guide.  It was then that I realized we painters who teach place too much emphasis on the tube color name rather than its visual potential.  

A number of efforts have been made to create charts and even color wheels that place tube colors where they likely fit best on the wheel, but for me, that is far too unwieldy for immediate visual expression, especially while mixing colors during a painting session. There's huge gap there.  

Bruce MacEvoy Pigments Chart by Inherent Value and Roughly with the Color Wheel

Such charts as well as color theory books can be helpful to our understanding, but painters learn best by experience. For that, we can add to these reference materials a simple process for decision making on the spot, a process I'm about to describe that is less cumbersome while we are painting.  

ONLY TWO THINGS TO LEARN

(1) We can learn how the traditional color wheel works. 

The hues on a wheel are arranged according to what they do to each other. Going around the wheel, we mix them together to create new hues. Going across the wheel, we combine them to vary saturations of those hues. A traditional color wheel does not show values, but we can refer to a value scale for those.

(2) We can learn the hue, the value, and the saturation of each of our tube colors.

Except for black, totally neutral grays and white, each tube color has one hue visible--either primary, secondary or tertiary. That hue out of the tube has either full saturation or a degree of desaturation. And out of the tube, it has an inherent value. (See MacEvoy's Chart above.)

Knowing these two things will go a long way towards doing on-the-spot mixing without so much frustration.  

For example, if you are painting a sky's reflection in water, but the color you mixed looks too green, look at the color wheel to find the hue you'd add to make it bluer. It's right there. Then remember which tube color you have containing this hue. 

     If the color is too saturated, locate your mixture on the wheel, then look across for the hue that will neutralize it. Find that tube color.

TRY THIS:

Here is a link for charting your favorite tube colors.  You can download and print it. 

If you click on the color wheel above, you can get a PDF copy of it.  Use it to find the hues of your tube colors.  As you create your chart, visualize where each tube's hue belongs on the traditional wheel.  If you can't decide, then refer to James Gurney's Pigment wheel which I have linked for you here.

Light and Shadow: The one thing that lets our eyes see.
Visual Movement: What our eyes do when images are visible.
Seeing Beyond the Image: The possibilities beyond just describing what our eyes see.
Freeing the Artist Within (Curiosity): Finding our individual interpretation to what our eyes are seeing. 
Composing:  Finding ways to put together all that we discover.
Drawing:  Searching the potential of images.
The Craft:  Continually forging our skills to visually communicate what we continue to discover with our eyes, mind and soul.

And the eighth:

The Art:  The results when all the above are working together.