Mixing colours and unexpected results

I have a painting I'm starting to work on and there's a large swath of orange in it. But for that painting, I wanted to get to the orange using a blend of colours where one tone was 'pretty' and one had an acrid, dissonant feel to it.

I recently did a tutorial through Billy Showell and she sells a specific line of Sennelier paints that she uses for most, if not all of her botanical paintings. So that got me thinking I may want to poke around my local art store (Delta Art) to see what other colours Sennelier makes. The great thing with professional quality paints in art stores is that they'll have a colour chart available with all the colours available for that particular brand of watercolour. This is particularly useful as a printed version is often very wrong, so it's good to see the actual colour you're looking to buy.

So when I was looking through the Sennelier paints, a couple of colours really stood out to me "Brown Pink" and "Brown Green". They had that element of acridity (is that a word?) that I was looking for.

The Sennelier "Brown Green" and Golden's watercolour line QoR colour "Green Gold" have the same pigment colour: PY129.

The difference then between the two paints would come down to cost and binders. Sennelier uses honey and Kordofan Gum Arabic as a binder while Golden uses Aquazol which is a conservator grade binder for their paints. I do find the QoR paint to be a bit more staining in comparison to the Sennelier.

I created a video where I mixed the colours in the swatch above, but you can see it mixed in real-time.

I hope this inspires you to play with your paint colours more to see what kind of whacky combinations you can create.

Thanks for reading.

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