Back to Basics | Autumn Colours with Claire Warner | SAA Archives

Hello, I'm Claire Warner and I'm going to show you how to mix some glorious autumn colours. Really, they're just glorious. They're oranges, they're reds, they're yellows, they're greens, they're browns, they're purples, they're dark browns, greys, blacks, just so many different colours. So we'll have a little play here and see how we can mix some. This is a picture that I painted of autumn leaves and they're just gorgeous, aren't they? Rich, earthy colours, but with such vibrance. And one thing I love is an autumn wood where you get all these lovely, rich, warm oranges and yellows and reds. But if you look at the tree trunks, they're actually quite dark, dark browns. You get this glorious contrast in the trees. So we'll mix some colours. I'm using a range of SAA paints. This one is a cadmium yellow. Which straight from the tube makes a really lovely autumn colour, obviously. But if you don't have that colour, you can make it with lemon yellow. And just a touch of pink. This happens to be quinacridone magenta, but really any pink or red, just a tiny touch. Don't do it much. Look how little I've used and you'll find that will change colour and it's almost gone orange. Add a little bit more lemon yellow. Look how quickly that changes and becomes a lovely warm yellow. So you can make that warm yellow using lemon yellow and a little pink or red of some sort. This is yellow ochre, another really typical colour for autumn. Can you see that variety of colours there? They're really lovely. And this is burnt sienna, so we'll be doing some mixing in a minute. But those just even on their own are just glorious. Okay, so cadmium red, a bright pillar box red would be nice, but if you don't have that, you can try using burnt sienna with a little pink and mix those together. And you can make quite an interesting red colour. I will sometimes use that rather than adding red. If I'm using a limited palette, I will make my red that way. Okay, let's have a look what we've got here. That is an ultramarine, so we'll add a little pink to that one, because actually I will often use in this picture here, you'll notice that just behind here, I've got some quite pinky purpley colours sitting there. And that's again, a colour that I will use often in autumn. Although you don't see it, it's very complementary to these colours. Delicious. This colour here is phthalo blue, it's a red shade. And I'll use that to make a very dark green in a bit. Right, so I think what we'll do is we will make some greens, we'll make some browns, we'll make some oranges. Right, let's make a green start with I'm going to use a warm yellow, add some ultramarine to it. What we've got is we've got quite a warm sort of mossy green, add a little bit more ultramarine. There we go. And we're just getting warmer and warmer. That's a lovely green, isn't it, for autumn. Let's try a little bit more of the ultramarine. Go darker again. There we go. So they really are warm, lovely warm greens. But another way you can make a good green, a very dark green is adding some burnt sienna to phthalo blue. I'm being careful because I don't want it to go brown, I want it to go green. And it's going, that actually is going black. Let's just use that one for a bit. Look, you've got quite a black colour there. So I've probably gone too far with the burnt sienna. Let's add a little bit more of this. If we get a minute. There we go, you can see that now, can't you? It's all like a scots pine colour. Do you see that? So that's another lovely green that I would use for the winter. Let's make some browns. I'm going to use burnt sienna. Add some ultramarine. I've got a brown, add a little bit more. I've got a dark brown. If I go on and on I will get black, but that's lovely. You can also make a grey that way. So I'm going to add a little bit more blue. I'm really going, see I've got a grey and if I add a lot, oh another lovely dark brown there, look. So you can just play, play and play and get more and more different colours. There we go, so they're quite lovely, aren't they? Let's make some oranges. That's my quinacridone magenta and cadmium red. That's delicious, isn't it? What a lovely colour. I'm just going to add a little bit more pink. There we go, you've got a lovely rich red there. Gosh, and let's make another one. This is actually indigo. I use that quite a lot too, next to it. That's a lovely colour. You could add a yellow to that as well, get an interesting green. What I suggest if you want to learn how to make colours is to make a chart. I very often want to put squares, lines of squares with space underneath and just play with mixing of colours, but always make sure you write underneath which colours you use to make it because you'll go back and think, how did I make that? In fact, I would do a page of oranges, a page of greys, browns, and you'd be amazed how many you'll find. That was the way that I learnt to paint watercolour. I literally did a whole page of different ways to make green and picked out the ones that I liked. They're the ones to this day, after 30 years, I still use. The other thing that I did in this one that I finished, because often you do in autumn, is I just gave them a little spray. I just got a colour and literally with my brush, just gave them a little spray. You know when you get the little spots, don't you, on the leaves? That's quite fun. You can put it on dry paper or here, I put it on wet paper here, but it just sort of breaks the colours up. It's quite fun. So do give it a go and I hope you have fun mixing those colours. Thank you for watching.