Mixing recipe
How to mix periwinkle
Target
#7C8EC8
Recipe mixes to #7A8FC4
Periwinkle is a soft blue with a clear violet lean, and the common box's Ultramarine comes out too dull in that much white. This recipe uses Zinc White with a part each of Quinacridone Rose and Phthalo Blue Red Shade: two transparent, strong pigments that stay clean in a tint.
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 Zinc Whitepile #F0F0ED
- Work in 1 part Phthalo Blue Red Shadepile #5EAAE2
- Add 1 part Quinacridone Rosepile #7A8FC4Strong tinter. Add it in knife-tip doses and mix fully before adding more.
Another route
Quinacridone Magenta in place of the Rose gives a slightly cooler, more lilac version at nearly the same accuracy. Pick whichever of the two quinacridones is in your box.
What goes wrong
Both color pigments are strong tinters in ten parts of white, so the mix is sensitive to a knife-tip either way: too much phthalo and it is a sky blue, too much rose and it is a mauve. Add the phthalo first, then the rose in small doses until the violet appears. Zinc White is weak and transparent; if you substitute Titanium White, use less of the tinters. Quinacridone Rose (flagged by the mixing guide as moving a pile hard for its share) and Phthalo Blue Red Shade (tinting strength 8, where a cadmium is 1) are the paints to be careful with here: they go 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.