Idyll Sketching

Beautiful Landscapes, Idly Painted

Mix Your Own: Moonglow

Logan

Daniel Smith’s Moonglow is a mix of three pigments:

(Da Vinci’s Artemis uses the same pigment combination.)

In this post, I will not actually be making a close match, for a few reasons:

  • It’s a three-pigment mix which you can definitely mix yourself by using those same pigments. If you would like a demonstration, Kim Crick’s video “Moonglow is Fugitive” shows how you can mix a close match and improve on it by replacing fade-prone PR177 with a more lightfast middle red, such as Quinacridone Coral (PR209).
  • I do not have most of the ingredients. (Currently, I only have Ultramarine; I don’t have either Viridian or Anthraquinone Red.)
  • I don’t actually like this color all that much or want to match it that closely!

Why Moonglow? What I like and don’t like

What I don’t like about Moonglow:

  • It’s fugitive – something I can avoid in my mixes by not using PR177 (can’t anyway as I don’t have it.)
  • I find it too green. I really can’t see the use case of painting a purple that has splotches of green in it. I can avoid this by not using Viridian (can’t anyway as I don’t have it).

What I do like about Moonglow:

  • It is a muted violet that has a mysterious appearance. I could see it being used in a stormy sky or in shadows, in place of gray.
  • It has interesting color separation.

Surely, that feeling is something I can get with colors I already use. The requirements are:

  • Muted violet: I can get this by mixing blues and pinks/reds that are muted or that aren’t both biased toward violet. (A violet-biased blue + a violet-biased pink will make a violet that is bright and vibrant, so I want to avoid that to go more muted.) In the original mix, this is achieved by the heavy use of green.
  • Color separation: I can get this by including at least one granulating paint in my mix. In the original mix, Viridian and Ultramarine are both granulating.

Experimental Mixes – Light

Top row:

  • Moonglow swatch, for comparison.
  • Ultramarine Blue (PB29) + Phthalo Green BS (PG7) + Pyrrol Red (PR254) – This is a close mix in terms of hues used, although it is balanced more toward Ultramarine and less toward the green, and it uses a non-granulating green so it is less granulating overall.
  • Cerulean Blue (PB36) + Pyrrol Red (PR254) – I thought to condense the mix of Ultramarine and green into a single, green-toned-blue, granulating pigment, Genuine Cerulean. This is a not-dissimilar hue to Moonglow and shares its cool-granulation-over-pink appearance in tint, although its granulation is smaller. That said, I think the blue granulation looks more convincing in a cloud use case than green.

Bottom row:

Experimental Mixes – Dark

Although I painted it out from the same dot, Moonglow looks darker here, probably because I used more pigment. Accordingly, I tried some darker mixes to mix the darker side of its personality.

Top row:

  • Moonglow swatch, for comparison.
  • Quin Coral (PR209) + Cobalt Turquoise (PG50) – This matches the eerie pink undertone and surprising blue-green color separation, but does not get as dark.
  • Perylene Violet (PV29) + Cobalt Turquoise (PG50) – This is probably the best overall match. It gets quite dark thanks to the Perylene Violet, and the Cobalt Turquoise gives it that surprising, greenish color separation. Because Perylene Violet is low chroma, though, it lacks the pink undertone.
  • Cobalt Blue (PB28) + Pyrrol Scarlet (PR255) – I attempted to cancel out the true blue with a scarlet, but it’s still more of a chromatic plum.

Bottom row:

Conclusion

There are many ways to mix low- to mid-chroma, granulating, stormy-sky violets, many of which I prefer to Moonglow. The basic recipe:

  • Choose a red or pink whose dilute color you want as the background ‘glow’ or undertone.
  • Choose a granulating blue/turquoise/green whose hue you want in the color-separating ‘granules.’
  • Try to make these two colors complementary so that they mix together in a dark, low-chroma way. If these colors mix too bright of a violet, add a dark, low-chroma color or complement to dull it out.

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