I hate watercolor mixing charts

What, me, the biggest proponent in the world of watercolor mixing charts, claiming to hate them? What???

Okay, I’m not talking about all mixing charts. I’m talking about a very specific, very common type that I find unhelpful.

It’s this type:

As far as I know, it doesn’t have a formal name. For this post, I’ll call it a “palette grid chart.” This is because it’s a grid and it attempts to explore an entire palette.

The palette grid chart is the most common type of mixing chart I see people make. Here’s how it works:

Make a grid with an equal number of rows and columns, one for each the paints in your palette. For example, in a 6 color palette, make a 6×6 grid.

(Note: I chose roughly the colors in the Daniel Smith Essentials palette here, but I used Da Vinci colors for a few of them, notably Hansa Yellow Light and Permanent Rose in place of Quin Rose.)

Now, in each cell, paint a mix of the row and column color. For example, where Hansa Yellow Light is in the row and New Gamboge is in the column, paint a mix of those two colors.

Here’s the completed chart.

For the diagonal, where the same color meets itself, you can paint the pure, unmixed color, as shown above. Or you can skip it, as shown below.

Ok! I spent a bunch of time making this chart. Now let’s explore why I hate it.

Problems with the palette grid chart

It’s difficult to read.

It is poor information design. It’s too busy and I always feel I have no idea what I’m looking at, even when I know how it works.

In theory, I should be able to look at any row or any column and see all the possible mixes with a single color. For example, here’s a process picture I took after making one column. This shows all the mixes with Hansa Yellow Light.

That’s not so bad, but I find it so much easier to read before everything else is filled in. Plus, common variations I’ll describe below render this “just look at the row or column” reading more complex.

It only shows one possible mix per pair.

While the overall impression you get from looking at this type of chart is “too much information,” actually its worst sin in my opinion is that it’s too little information. For each pair, you can only show one possible mix (or maximum two, above and below the diagonal). But there are tons of ways to mix two paints together!

For example, here’s a two-color mixing chart of Phthalo Blue GS and Hansa Yellow Light.

Mixes range from cyan to teal to mid green to yellow-green to green-yellow, and everything in-between. You can also make it more or less saturated. If you’re following the palette grid chart, you would assume that these two colors can only make one of these mixes, probably the saturated green in the middle.

The palette grid chart underestimates how much you can do with a limited palette and overestimates how many paints you need to make distinct mixes. And that’s completely leaving aside the possibility of mixes with more than two colors.

It’s repetitive.

For each mix, there are two spots on the chart it appears. For example, let’s say we want to find the mix of New Gamboge and French Ultramarine. It will appear once when New Gamboge is the row and French Ultramarine is the column, and once when French Ultramarine is the row and New Gamboge is the column. I’ve outlined them both in a red dotted line below, on the version of the chart with a blank diagonal.

The chart is symmetrical over the diagonal. Each mix appears twice. This means double the work for you, but not double the information.

(Note each mix appears twice, but pure unmixed color appears once, if at all. In my opinion, this causes the chart to overrepresent mixes and underrepresent pure color. So, primary-color palettes end up with charts that are mostly secondary colors, which feels not representative.)

Some artists have tried ways to fix the repetitiveness in various ways, but each of these has their own drawbacks.

For example, you might paint only one half of the chart, resulting in a sort of stepped triangle.

This is actually a process photo I took while making my chart, but if you were planning to make it just the one side, you wouldn’t need to draw the rest of the grid. For example, here’s a purely triangular chart from the (now sadly defunct) Scratchmade Journal.

Theoretically, this is time-saving and simplifying, but there’s a problem. You can’t just look at a single row or a single column and see all the mixes with that color. Instead, mixes with a single color are on an L-shape, with the diagonal as the crux of the L. For example, in my chart, here are all the mixes with Pyrrol Scarlet, outlined in dotted navy blue.

I don’t know, I just find this super non-intuitive. I’m always reading it wrong and putting the L in the wrong place, even when I know what I’m supposed to do. This is especially problematic in versions of the chart that don’t make it as easy to find the diagonal.

Another option for reducing the repetition is to use the two spots for different types for mixes. For example, you might show saturated mixes above the diagonal and diluted mixes below the diagonal. I didn’t do this in my chart because I did not want to make two versions, but here’s an example of Denise Soden’s Earth Friendly Palette from Da Vinci.

This helps with variety and adds more information, but you still have the problem of needing to follow a confusing L-shape to locate the same types of mix for a single color. And the saturated and diluted mix of the same color aren’t next to each other, so if you want to find and compare those, you need to locate the equivalent location above and below the diagonal. You need a ruler just to interpret the chart!

I was later told there’s another version where you shift the proportion of each mix, so, for example, instead of a 50/50 color mix twice, you would do more of whatever color is in the column and less in the row (or vice versa, as long as you’re consistent). That need for consistency adds more complexity to the making of the chart and therefore more things that can go wrong. Plus, similar to the saturated/diluted version of the chart, you still have the problem that the two varieties of the same mix are not next to each other, and now the balanced mix isn’t on there at all.

If you make any changes to your palette, you need to start over.

Because this chart attempts to put all mixes of a palette into one chart, it locks you in. If you still have room on your paper, I guess you could add another row and column to the outside. But if you remove or swap anything, your chart is obsolete.

It’s hard to make.

It’s so time consuming, and one mistake means you’ve ruined the whole thing.

The design of it requires lots of little boxes next to each other, which is just asking for bleed between boxes (which I got). You can avoid the boxes sharing borders if you draw them with a gutter in between or you make the grid out of tape, but that makes it even more fiddly.

I also got confused several times and almost put things in the wrong box, because it’s as confusing to make as it is to read.

My preferred mixing charts

Color Spotlights

My Color Spotlight posts include swatches of a single color, and simple “starting point” style mixing charts that show this color mixed with various others.

The mixing chart is never intended to be complete – I don’t mix with all my colors, and I don’t even have standard colors I always mix with. I just mix with a variety of colors I happen to have on hand to give myself an idea of the possibilities.

This roughly emulates looking at just one row or column of the palette grid chart at a time: thinking “What does a mix with this color look like? How does this color mix?” Mentally, I find it easier to isolate one color at a time if there’s nothing else on the page.

This is my go-to exercise when I get a new paint. No need to start over and re-chart my entire palette: I’m just exploring how this paint mixes.

These charts still only show one mixing possibility for each pair, which is why I consider it a first step. If I’m interested in any of the pairs and want to explore them further, I will make…

Two-color mixing charts

My favorite chart is a two-color mixing chart! There are many ways to accomplish this.

I first began with a fairly messy style, inspired by Liz Steel.

This evolved into my most common format, which includes a gradient from one color to the other, and individual mixes below.

Occasionally I’ve dabbled with other formats, like this Claire Giordano format that includes more mixes, smaller lines, a diluted gradient, and the two colors laid next to each other on a gradient to showcase pushiness.

I even experimented with an even more time-consuming version in which I do a little mini painting featuring the mix.

Other people have other styles, often neater than mine. You don’t need to follow my formats. To me, the most important thing is to try to explore a wide range of mixes.

Triad charts

When I want to see how three colors work together, I usually make a color wheel and a small painting, as I did in Triadvent.

Triad Grid Chart

You can make even more involved charts to show three-color mixes, such as those shown about 5 minutes into Art Summit’s polemic against the palette grid chart.

Here, the top row is a two-color chart of Hansa Yellow Light to Quin Rose. Each subsequent row repeats that yellow-to-red progression, but with a little more Phthalo Blue GS added each time.

Essentially, the outside of this chart shows the bright two-color mixes, similar to a triad color wheel.

It’s those inside squares that are reserved for the three-color mixes.

You can make the grid any size; more squares = more steps between colors and more fine-grained mix variations. You can only ever show three colors, though: two on the X axis and one more on the Y axis.

This is a type of chart I don’t make often because it has some of the same problems as the palette grid: it’s time-consuming, fiddly, requires neatness, invites bleed, kinda hard to make and easy to mess up, etc. There are also aspects of it I find non-intuitive, such as the fact that two of the colors are inside the chart in the upper left and right corners, but the third unmixed color exists outside the chart altogether. It’s a little confusing.

But I do think it shows something interesting and it also does something none of the other charts I’ve shown does, even the triad chart: it invites systematic exploration of muted, three-color mixes. That’s hard to do! And I have done very little of it, really, since two-color mixes are a lot easier to explore. Even now, while I did not feel I got anything new out of the big palette grid chart, I did find that this three-color grid showed me sage greens and rich browns that I never knew you could get out of this modern primary triad!

Arguments in favor of the palette grid chart

It may not be my favorite chart, but in the interest of fairness, here are some pro-palette grid chart arguments.

It takes on a bigger scope than my preferred mixing charts do. I don’t have a solution for a single-glance view of an entire palette. You’d have to make a lot of two-color charts to cover an entire palette. For an 24-color palette, for example, like Denise Soden’s shown above, there are 276 possible pairs of two colors. (You can figure this out by realizing that a palette grid is 24×24, and you subtract out the 24 single colors on the diagonal, and divide the rest by 2 since there are two spots for each mix. Or, you can use the combinatorics formula C(n, r) = n! / r(n – r)! where n is the palette size [24] and r is the number of colors you can show in a pairwise chart at once [2].) Do you want 276 little slips of paper with a mixing pair on each one, or do you want a big 24×24 grid?

I would argue the slips of paper show much more than the grid, but you can’t see them all at once. I would also argue that being able to see things all at once isn’t a great boon if you can’t mentally process them all at once, but maybe I have unusually low processing power, I don’t know. Personally, I have to make things simpler for myself.

It’s a starting point to decide which palette mixes are interesting. Making two-color charts presumes you know which color pairs will be interesting. But what if you’re brand new and you’ve got a starter palette and you have no idea how anything mixes with anything else? If you start with a palette grid, you can jump right into making a prototype of every mix, so you know which ones you want to dig into further.

I can see this use case; personally I find the Color Spotlights to be a more helpful starting point for each new-to-me color, but this may just be where I am on my journey right now. I pretty much know how the most common pairs mix, and I don’t need it in every chart. If every color’s new to you, maybe you want to try as much as possible at once. Just don’t expect that this big chart will show you everything, since three-color mixes are absent.

It’s meditative and fun to make. Personally, I’m wary when people call things “meditative,” since to me it almost always means “tedious.” If you do find it fun, though, that is absolutely the most convincing reason to continue to do it. Still, fun to make doesn’t necessarily equal useful result. It’s possible some other type of chart could scratch a similar itch while providing more informative results.

Conclusion

If you truly enjoy making a palette grid chart, more power to you. But if it feels like a chore, I hereby give you permission to simply not!

Explore mixing in whatever way feels easy and fun to you, whether that is a neat and tidy grid, a bunch of puddles, or no charts and just exploring spontaneous scratch paper mixes each time.

There are many ways to mix two colors, and even more ways to mix three or more colors. I don’t think it is actually possible to make a clear and readable chart that shows all mixing possibilities for a whole palette at once. There are too many!

That’s a good thing: the vast mixing possibilities of a relatively small number of colors means that you don’t need too many paints to make a whole rainbow. When in doubt, I like to reduce the number of colors I am exploring at once, get more in depth with each color and combination.