Mixing recipe
How to mix turquoise
Target
#40C4B4
Recipe mixes to #29C7B6
Turquoise is a saturated blue-green, and nothing in a common 10-tube box has the chroma for it. Phthalo Green in white, one part to five, gets there in two tubes. The phthalo is the whole color; the white sets the value.
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 5 parts Titanium Whitepile #F6F6F4
- Add 1 part Phthalo Greenpile #29C7B6Strong tinter. Add it in knife-tip doses and mix fully before adding more.
Another route
Adding a part of Titan Buff lands a hair closer and takes the icy edge off, for a turquoise that sits better next to warm colors. It is not a simpler mix, just a slightly softer one.
What goes wrong
Phthalo Green is about seven times the strength of a cadmium, and a part in six is a lot of it. Put the white out first and add the green in small amounts, mixing each fully; if you start from the green you will use a tube of white getting back. If the result looks too green rather than blue, a speck of Cerulean pulls it over. Phthalo Green (tinting strength 7, 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.