Mix Your Own: Raw Umber

“A deep cool brown is a useful palette colour as it is difficult to mix,” Jane Blundell writes of Raw Umber. Challenge accepted! Can I mix Raw Umber?

This is one of my messier experiments, but hopefully it’s still informative.

For my comparison color, I used Da Vinci’s Raw Umber as I have it in a dot card.

Top row

1. Transparent Red Oxide + Indanthrone Blue

This is my typical mix for a cool dark brown though as you can see in comparison it is much grayer/bluer. I could have made it more orangey with a balance more toward TRO and less toward the blue, but it never really gets that green undertone. Personally, I find a grayer/bluer brown more useful, but that’s not the exercise for today!

2. Phthalo Blue GS (PB15:3) + Burnt Sienna

Burnt Sienna is a classic brown mixer and the green undertones of the Phthalo Blue bring this much closer to the target mix. This is fairly successful, though I struggled to get it dark enough without getting too blue. The whole range includes a variety of nice green-browns and slate blues.

3. Phthalo Turquoise + Burnt Sienna

Very similar, but I found it easier to get this one darker.

Middle row

4. Phthalo Turquoise + Venetian Red

This was in my notes as an option to try after finding it “Raw Umber like” in my Venetian Red color mixes. Does this look Raw Umber like to you? It did to me when I painted it out, but now I don’t think so. I probably misremembered what Raw Umber looks like. The brown is very nice, but it’s quite red.

5. Phthalo Turquoise + Terra Cotta

This is an attempt to move away from a reddish brown by choosing a more orangey earth mixer. I find the result very true to my mental image of what Raw Umber is, though I can actually see when comparing it to the one from DV that my mental image is darker, bluer, and lower-chroma than the reality. Still, I think this is a successful, low-chroma, green-toned brown. Just maybe not quite green-toned enough.

6. Burnt Sienna + Phthalo Green Blue Shade

This is the most successful mix on the page in terms of matching the target color. It’s hard to overestimate just how green the undertones of Raw Umber are, and using actual green seems to work well.

7. Terra Cotta + Indanthrone Blue

Very similar to #1 TRO + IB, so not green enough, kind of included for completeness. As with the TRO and PB60 mix, I like this better, but it’s not Raw Umber-like.

8. Transparent Red Oxide + Phthalo Turquoise

A quirk of using Daniel Smith’s TRO as a primary earth orange mixer is that it’s so granulating that it can cause color separation, especially in Phthalo mixes. This makes it harder to get something like “raw umber hue,” or similar, but does do interesting stuff in the right dilution.

Bottom Row

9. Venetian Red + Phthalo Green Yellow Shade

I initially thought this one didn’t get too dark because of the opacity of the Venetian Red but I was able to make quite dark mixes with plenty of pigment. A little VR makes the green into forest greens, while a lot makes a lovely set of browns. I found they were consistently either too red or too green for Raw Umber – lacking I guess a desaturated yellow tone? – but they get close and are, I think, very nice.

10. Perylene Red + Phthalo Green Yellow Shade

This combination was also unbelievably in my notes for “raw umber like shades,” but it’s one of my least successful mixes. The bold green and red are nearly complements, so it basically just mixes gray. Again, I must have just misremembered Raw Umber as basically sepia or black-brown.

11. Perylene Maroon + Phthalo Green Blue Shade

The warmer, browner hue of Perylene Maroon does not complement the green as much as the middle red, so it’s easier to get browns instead of grays. The browns are still a bit too desaturated and not yellow enough for Raw Umber, but they make really nice browns of varying levels of reddish and greenish undertone, which I think are quite excellent for real-life bark that I see in my environment.

12. Perylene Maroon + Phthalo Green Yellow Shade

The mixes with the yellower Phthalo Green is a little warmer/yellower and therefore I think it got a little closer, especially in that second dark brown. I also like the dark greens better.

13. Transparent Red Oxide + Phthalo Green Yellow Shade

As with the other TRO mixes, the granulating, color-separating nature of the TRO prevented full mixing, especially in mid-dilution, and at the edges between gradients. This is a cool effect but doesn’t mimic Raw Umber.

Conclusion

In terms of matching the target color, the best match was: Burnt Sienna + Phthalo Green BS (PG7).

Also making good Raw Umber-adjacent hues:

• Burnt Sienna + Phthalo Turquoise (PB16)
• Burnt Sienna + Phthalo Blue GS (PB15:3)
• Venetian Red + Phthalo Green YS (PG36)
• Perylene Maroon + Phthalo Green YS (PG36)

I found that I tended to like the more desaturated and/or bluer browns more than the color I set out to mix, both on an aesthetic level and in terms of mixing colors I see in my environment. This will vary, certainly, Luckily, there are a lot of options for a great brown! The general formula is: any earth color (I usually use a form of earth orange or red), plus any blue or green.