It’s tulip time in the garden and I have in my sight the beautiful Tulipa ‘Ballerina’, a bright orange lily-flowered tulip that glows in the early spring sun. Its waxy tepals show an array of orange variations, from the undertones of green bias yellow to the red bias orange of the central veins on the outer surface, and everything in between.
Do I start with an orange base or do I mix my own orange from red and yellow? Both methods work and both are legitimate ways to go about colour-mixing… I did an exercise on Patreon with my subscribers, the result being 108 orange mix variations, some starting with Daniel Smith Permanent Orange (PO62) as a base and some using a range of primary yellows and reds in my palette to mix the secondary orange. After all these experiments, we are now ready to paint the ‘Ballerina’ together, as our new Patreon project…
Here is a video explaining the two methods mentioned above and showing the mixes that resulted from the exercises:
Happy Painting!
Sandrine Maugy 