How to Avoid Muddy Color Mix

One of the essential parts of working with watercolor is to mix colors to get secondary and tertiary colors so that your painting looks richer. But this might become extra difficult sometimes as some colors don't mix well. But why do they yield these ugly muddy colors when they mix? In order to prevent your frustration, I will give you some helpful tips here.

Let's start with the color wheel. The color wheel includes the primary, secondary and tertiary colors. Yellow, blue and red are primary colors. When you mix the three, you get black color.

Every painter should have a color wheel in hand. If you don't have one, I highly recommend you to make one for yourself! I will explain why this is so important in a second.

Secondary colors are formed when you mix 2 primary colors. Thus, orange, green and purple are secondary colors. If you mix a secondary color with a primary color, you get a tertiary color.