Mixing guide
How to mix orange
Easy to mix, easy to overdo. The useful oranges are the ones that have been taken down a little.
Orange is the simplest mixture on the palette: a warm yellow and a warm red, in almost any ratio, will get you there. The difficulty is not making it but keeping it usable.
A saturated orange dominates everything around it. In practice most of the oranges you need — terracotta, rust, autumn leaves, warm light on skin — are orange that has been muted with its opposite, which is blue.
Because orange sits opposite blue on the color wheel, that same pairing is how you make your neutrals. An orange and a blue in the right proportion is the most useful gray you will ever mix.
The mixtures
Each one worked out on a real palette with the spectral model. The number after the mixture is how far it lands from the target: under 2 you cannot see the difference, under 4 it does not matter in a painting.
Bright orange #D96F2A
A ripe fruit in direct light. About as saturated as paint gets.
10× Cadmium Yellow Light +2× Alizarin Crimson (permanent) +1× Ultramarine
9× Cadmium Yellow Light +2× Quinacridone Rose +1× Ultramarine
1× Yellow Ochre
Full wash.
Terracotta #A85E3C
Roof tiles, flower pots, warm stone.
10× Burnt Sienna +1× Titanium White +1× Yellow Ochre
7× Cadmium Yellow Light +3× Ultramarine +2× Quinacridone Rose
10× Burnt Sienna +1× Lemon Yellow
Medium wash, roughly 1 part paint to 1 parts water.
Muted apricot #D9A177
Warm light on a pale surface.
7× Titanium White +5× Burnt Sienna +2× Yellow Ochre
9× Lemon Yellow +4× Titanium White
This palette cannot quite reach that color with 3 pigments in one mixture. What you see is the closest it gets, which is worth knowing before you spend an afternoon trying.
8× Burnt Sienna +3× Yellow Ochre
Very thin wash, roughly 1 part paint to 10 parts water.
Worth remembering
- Use the warm yellow, not the cool one; lemon yellow pulls the mixture towards a greenish orange.
- A trace of ultramarine takes orange exactly where it needs to go for anything weathered.
- For the brightest possible orange, do not add white. White lifts the value but takes the fire out.
Your paints, your photo
These mixtures assume the palettes above. Tick off what you actually own and pick the color straight out of your reference instead.