Today, it's a watercolor tutorial all about mixing grays and the variety of ways that you can do it. Let's get started. Alright, today what we're going to do is we're going to mix grays and I'm going to show you a variety of ways. The first way is to look at gray as a triad. If you take the primary colors, a ready yellow and a blue and combine them together, you will get a neutral. You'll either get a gray or you'll get a brown. This is my go-to gray which is serally blue, Naples yellow and permanent rose. So I load the brush up, clean it and then go into the next color and then I'll clean the brush and go into the third color. This is called triad work and you can use this lots of time for any time you want to make a gray you can use this or a neutral. It's a way of making a neutral without mixing a specific color but letting them blend together and then when you pull away, if you squint your eyes a little bit, you'll see that that's a light gray. Now I'm going to make my dark gray triad that I use which is ultramarine blue, it's going to be ultramarine blue, a lizard in crimson and a bird sienna. That's my go-to triad for dark gray. So this can be used on the petals of this well, all of these can be used in the same way that you use gray but it's just using color to get there. And it kind of pulls the eye because you let the colors mix on the paper, rather than you mixing them on the palette again, it has to be a ready yellow and a blue. So in this case, the blue is ultramarine blue, the red is a lizard crimson and the yellow is a bird sienna. And I'm going to put that on the paper, I'm using a flat brush, but you can use a round brush, you can use anything you want. Just make sure that you charge the brush, you know, put a lot of paint on the brush, I clean the brush, then go into the next color. And then I'll clean the brush and go into the final color. So there's a light triad for gray and a dark triad for gray. So the light triad I would use for probably making clouds or maybe the inside of a white flower petal. And the dark triad I would probably use for the dark shadow and the building. I use a lot when I'm painting animals, you know, getting involved in the dark fur of an animal. So those are my go-to triads for grays. But what if you don't want to do triad work? You know, what if you want to mix grays? Well, then what you do is you put them together, mixing them all together, rather than leaving them single and combining them. So again, it's a really blue, a rose, a permanent rose, a Naples yellow, and it makes a nice gray. Now I've made it to red there, so I've got to tip it back with some Naples yellow. Alright, so there's my gray. Now this is a warm gray. It's a relatively warm gray. The reason I say it's a warm gray is because the colors are relatively light. So really blue is a light blue. Naples yellow is a light yellow, and the rose is a light red. Now in order to make that gray warmer, I'm going to tip it even more by adding some Naples yellow to it. And there's a warm gray. So I'm going to show you just how much color you can make when you're using grays. Here's to really am blue. I'm going to make this a cooler gray. There's my Alizarin, I mean, not my permanent rose. Naples yellow, I combined them before. And that's how I made that initial gray. But now I want to cool it down instead of warming it up, I'm going to cool it down. And in order to cool it down, I use Serolium Blue. A little bit more permanent rose. That is way too red. Naples yellow back to the, the Serolium Blue back to the Naples yellow. Okay, I'm in the gray range again. So I'm just showing you that that's where I would start from. That would be a warm gray. But I want to tip it and make it cooler. In order to make it cooler, I have to go look at the color wheel. And if you look at the color wheel on the upper right hand side, in order to cool it down, I would move toward blue. I would add more blue. So I added an ultramarine blue, which is not my darkest blue, but it's certainly darker than Serolium Blue. And that is going to make it cooler gray. So what you see there is a warm gray on the left where I'm pointing, and then a cool gray just below it. But they're all made from the same mix. All these colors or neutrals or grays, what everyone will call them, were made by Serolium Blue Naples yellow and a rose. Now I'm going to do the same thing with my dark triad, which was ultramarine blue, burnt sienna, and a lizard and crimson. It makes those all together to get a gray. It's going to be a darker gray, because these are darker colors to begin with. Ultramarine blue was darker. A lizard and crimson is a dark red. But I'm using Naples yellow because, I just like it. I use Naples yellow a lot. And if I had used a different yellow, like a Hansa yellow, everything would have tipped much more toward a brown. And I wanted to demonstrate gray is not brown. Okay, there's my beginning gray. That's just putting the triad, oh, look what I'm doing. Okay, I guess I decided to warm it up with some of that Hansa yellow. Let's see if that works. Yeah, I think it's going to work. Yep, it's going to work. There you go. Not really leaning more toward brown, but it is gray. Let's see what am I doing here. Ultramarine blue back into my mixture. Okay, I see what I'm doing. So what I'm doing now is I'm cooling it down. There we go. So that's cooler. That's taking that initial gray mixture and cooling it down by adding a marine blue, it blew to it in a little bit of rose. So you can see you can make a warm gray from that triad when you combine it together. And then you can also make a cool gray. All right, I'm not sure what's happening here. I've gone back to my original mix of cerulean blue, Naples yellow, and permanent rose. What, I'm off camera. Oh, I see. Okay, I'm just showing, oh, I see what I'm doing. I'm showing that you can have a block of a color like that. Let's say you use that as a shadow. And then you can drop some Naples yellow right inside it. You could drop any color in there, but Naples yellow will sort of make it not just one color, but you know, that's a beautiful thing about watercolors. As long as things are wet, you can drop some color into your, the puddle that you have on your paper. So look at all those colors. I mean, that's a lot of colors. So gray, and you know, I would argue that even though they're all gray, there's not a gray in the bunch. There's the light triad, and there's this dark triad. And if you squint your eyes, you'll see that the light triad probably is in the range of, say, one or two. And a value range in the dark one is way down into five. And there's all the different grays that I mixed and showed you how to do it. Here are some great artists. And let's look at how they use grays. This is Winsol Homer. And you can see he did the same thing that I did with those triads. He probably used similar colors as well. Definitely Naples yellow happy in there. This is an oil by Winsol Homer. The warm side of the rocks is a warm gray, and the cool side of the, is a cool gray. This is, this is John Singer Sargent. Look at the neutral he is using here to describe on, well, the water, behind, and also the wrinkles in the clothing. This is a really famous John Singer Sargent painting. You know, it's almost all neutrals except for, you know, her lips, her nails, and that little bit of orange. Amazing. Sezon, these are really, really cool grays. Look how cool, almost cold they are. But the fruit, it makes the fruit much brighter and warmer because it has, it's surrounded by cool grays. The next is a, I'll sezon with much warmer grays. There's a lot of yellow in those grays. And, and that's just a way to manipulate temperature. You know, you can decide if you want things to be warmer or cooler. This is Charles Reed, and look at the triad work he does in the rock formations. He just, you can see a lot of the colors that I just used as well, but he's just, he just really lets color dance. But it creates a neutral, which would look very different if he had painted the rock just one color. This is Charles Reed again instead of warm grays created by triads. He's here, he's making cool grays. See underneath the boat, he's using the same triad that I was using to make a cool gray. And also on the man's skin. This is Monet coming up. You can see some really cool grays happening here in the snow. He's got a lot of purple or violet going on in the snow. The shadows of the snow, I mean. And now he's manipulating and making really warm grays. It's sort of amazing how warm all those grays are and how he creates a neutral by putting colors next to each other. So remember to keep the white to your people white, your paint sweat, mass or value, mix for color and use neutrals when you can. Please join my YouTube channel if you haven't done so yet. At least to have the people at Foxies haven't joined yet. Please join. It's free and it's fun. And I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.