Mixing recipe
How to mix lavender
Target
#B5A6D6
Recipe mixes to #B6A6D1
Lavender is a pale violet, and the clean way to it is white with a part each of Ultramarine Blue and Quinacridone Rose. The two are near neighbours on the wheel, so the violet stays clean rather than greying. The Rose is the tube outside a common box; Alizarin in its place comes out duller.
The recipe
This one reaches outside the common 10-tube starter box. The paints above are from Masstone’s full pigment library.
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 10 parts Titanium Whitepile #F6F6F4
- Work in 1 part Ultramarine Bluepile #A9C5F1
- Add 1 part Quinacridone Rosepile #B6A6D1Strong tinter. Add it in knife-tip doses and mix fully before adding more.
Another route
Cobalt Blue in place of Ultramarine, with a little more of it, gives a slightly bluer lavender that is a point further off. Use it when the lavender has to sit next to warm colors and read as blue-ish; the Ultramarine mix is the more violet of the two.
What goes wrong
The order matters. Blue first turns the white a pale sky color; the rose then swings it to lavender in a very small amount. Add the rose a knife-tip at a time, because a half part too much turns it to pink. If the result looks grey, the rose has been replaced with a duller red; it needs a clean, transparent one. Quinacridone Rose (flagged by the mixing guide as moving a pile hard for its share) is the paint to be careful with here: it goes in last, a knife-tip at a time, and a little too much cannot be mixed back out.
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.