Mixing recipe
How to mix plum
Target
#6E2E5A
Recipe mixes to #662152
Plum is a dark, dull red-violet and it is hard to get from a common box, which has no violet in it. Cobalt Violet in Titan Buff, one part to three, lands within good range. The buff greys and warms the violet so it reads as a plum rather than a purple.
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 3 parts Titan Buffpile #E0CFB2
- Add 1 part Cobalt Violetpile #662152Strong tinter. Add it in knife-tip doses and mix fully before adding more.
Another route
Naples Yellow in place of the Titan Buff gives the same result a touch warmer, with the yellow doing the greying. Use whichever you have. Both lean a little deeper and redder than the target; a speck of white brings the value up.
What goes wrong
Cobalt Violet is weak by tinting strength but the mixing guide flags it as moving this pile hard, because the buff is pale and anything dark shifts it a long way. Add the violet in halves. Without a violet pigment, Alizarin and Ultramarine in white can get near a plum but come out greyer; the engine put that route outside good range. Cobalt Violet (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.