Mixing recipe
How to mix coral
Target
#F07860
Recipe mixes to #F3735A
Coral is a light, warm red with yellow in it. Cadmium Red with white lifts it to the right value, and a part of Cadmium Yellow turns the pink toward orange. Three opaque tubes, all from a common box, and nothing in it is a strong tinter.
The recipe
Step by step
Build the pile from the biggest, lightest component and work toward the strongest tinter. Check the pile against each swatch before moving on.
- Start with 3 parts Cadmium Redpile #E64333
- Work in 2 parts Titanium Whitepile #F3706A
- Work in 1 part Cadmium Yellowpile #F3735A
Another route
Yellow Ochre in place of the Cadmium Yellow gives a duller, more salmon-like coral, about three ΔE further off. It is the one for coral in shadow or for a muted fabric. The cadmium mix is cleaner and the better match for anything in light.
What goes wrong
The red-and-white stage is a pink, and the yellow is what makes it coral. Add it in halves: a full part at once can overshoot to a peach, and because everything here is opaque, correcting means adding a lot of red back. If the coral looks chalky, there is too much white; add red and yellow together rather than one of them.
Related colors
Results vary with brand, lighting and medium. Acrylic dries a touch darker than it looks wet. Treat this as a mixing aid, not a lab instrument: it tells you which tubes to reach for and roughly in what proportion. Fine-tune the last stretch by eye.