Cadmium Red Medium to Turquoise,( Pthalo Green) Using Opposites on the Color Wheel

This can be done with other Reds and Greens also.  These are  two acrylic tubes of paint that I had on hand.  I used Stephen Quiller's Color Wheel to make my decision.  He constructed his wheel after much study as to which reds and greens mix together best to form the most perfect combinations.  If you search for Stephen Quiller on the world wide web you will find his books and his color wheel.

First, make  a lot of mixes of Cadmium Red Medium and Turquoise which is also called Pthalo Green.  For me, it works best to start from Cad. Red Med.  and add a tiny bit of Turquoise, then a tiny bit more until I am close to Black.  I also start the other direction...Turquoise to Cad. Red Med, again mixing the Red in bit by bit until I am close to Black.  Eventually, I have a page that looks like the one above.

Then I lay down a pure Cadmium Red Medium and a pure Turquoise.

After that, I look among the blackest colors I have mixed and lay the blackest between the pure colors.

Isn't it amazing that two bright colors will mix into Black?  This black is a vibrant black, not a dead black like a pigment from the tube black.  That is why artists take the time to mix it.

The ability to make a vibrant black is a unique feature of Complementary Colors, the colors opposite one another on the Color Wheel.  Yellow and Purple will make black.and so will Orange and Blue.  Yellow-green, the color between Yellow and Green combined with Magenta, the color between Red and Blue will also make black. That is because, like red and green, they are opposite on the color wheel.

The rest of this color experiment is similar to the Gray Value Scale that I posted in.

I looked through the colors I had mixed for steps from pure color to black.

I decided I had too many close to black in the center section so I took out three.

A closer view of the red sequence ...

And the turquoise (Pthalo Green) sequence.