Mixing recipe
How to mix teal
Target
#2A7F80
Recipe mixes to #288081
Teal is a blue-green with a lot of grey in it, and the surprise is how little blue it takes. The base is Titan Buff, a warm off-white, with Lemon Yellow for the green side and one part of Phthalo Blue Red Shade doing all the heavy lifting.
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 2 parts Titan Buffpile #E0CFB2
- Work in 1 part Lemon Yellowpile #DED276
- Work in 1 part Phthalo Blue Red Shadepile #288081
Another route
If you own Phthalo Green but not the red shade of Phthalo Blue, build it the other way round: Naples Yellow as the base, Phthalo Green for the hue and Indanthrone Blue to pull it toward teal. It comes out a touch bluer and darker, and still a close match. Both routes depend on a phthalo; a 10-tube box without one gets to a dull, greener version at best.
What goes wrong
Phthalo Blue Red Shade is about eight times the strength of a cadmium, so one part is a lot and a careless knife-load ruins the pile. Mix the buff and yellow fully first so you are adding blue to a pale, even green rather than streaks. Titan Buff is what keeps the mix soft; swapping it for Titanium White gives a cleaner but harsher teal that reads as turquoise. Phthalo Blue Red Shade (tinting strength 8, where a cadmium is 1) 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.