The Color Brown

The color brown is an interesting thing since it's not actually a color on its own. You won't find it on any color wheel and the art stores have the various shades in their own offset from the real colors. Brown is a muted orange. Yes, it's orange. Go figure.

Let that sink in for a bit. Brown isn't a color. Take a look at these two color range images and see if you can spot the overlaps. Once you see it you can't unsee it. You can thank me later.

I've been doing some color mixing and browns are part of that. You'd think it was easy - grab some form of raw and/or burnt umber, maybe add a color, done. Nope. It doesn't quite get that simple. Well, most of the time it is but only if you want a warm brown. Once you get into shades of brown it gets more complicated. Because brown doesn't exist on its own.

What brought about this post was me having made a mistake in my painting and needing to correct it without messing it up worse. In short I'd used an orange heavy brown where I shouldn't have done. The painting is too far along for me to want to strip and start over, especially since I've done that once before with these.

It turns out I hadn't actually mixed the type of brown I wanted. Or maybe I did and grabbed the wrong bottle. Of course I haven't labeled the bottles even now. The end result is a lot of places painted far more orange of a shade than I would like.

So the solution seems easy. Make a brown wash and fix it right up. Not so fast. That orange isn't going away. Putting a brown over it is a tricky business because then I'll have an orange undercoat and brown doing whatever it's doing on top of that. The wrong shade and tone of brown over that orange could easily make things worse instead of better.

I have a book on mixing colors for watercolor, acrylic, and oil paints. I've been referring to it as part of this overall project and I'm pleased to note that there haven't been many big surprises. I'm decent on my color theory. Maybe not great but for the projects so far I've had a handle on it.

But this one has been a stumper. I've continued painting while trying to figure out how best to fix this mistake I made with minimum effort. More will be made clear as to why the fix is slightly more difficult than it might seem. Bear with me.

Tonight I had a revelation. I was talking brown with someone else and it got me thinking of how easy and how difficult it is to make a brown using other colors. Pretty much take any three colors, mix them, and you'll get brown. It might not be a pretty brown but you'll get brown. More importantly you'll get shades of brown. Unless you've used a purple brown you really don't see what this means. Yes. I have purple brown paint. It's useful.

As I said earlier brown is just an orange kind of shade. I'm trying to take an orange heavy color and brown it down. The fog cleared a little and I realized what I need to do is take that same shade and add some color to it to make it more brown. It took far longer for me to reach that conclusion than it should have but I was sulking.

So what color do you add to orange to make it more brown? Orange is really just red and yellow so blue seems the obvious answer. Since it's the obvious answer I did some research in my handy book of color mixing to find out I was right in that it wasn't the answer. According to the book I need to add some mauve. Instead of blue I need a blue shading to red. In my mind that's going to make the end result rather red heavy (orange is red and yellow and I'm looking at adding blue and red) but it's worth a shot.

Tomorrow is the test. I'll use the same base color and add just a touch of blue. Blue is a very intense color and anything with a heavy yellow mix is not. Again, color theory. I won't get into yellows here but I will probably have a rant on them in the near future. Therefore anything I add needs to be done with a light touch. If the blue doesn't quite work out then a touch of red. I can play with this all I like since it only take a few drops to find out if it will work or not.

I don't have to make much note of what I'm doing here. I'll be mixing up a completely new brown to take the place of the mistake in the future. Of course I will take notes in case I really like the resulting brown so I can duplicate it, starting with the orange type color as the base. I always take notes now. So when I say I won't make much note of it I think I mean that I'm not going to make a chemistry experiment level kind of notetaking. More of a reference. I think. I don't know. I'll write something down at least.

I'm very curious to see if my knowledge of color theory will hold up in practice. It's easy to say that something should work and to see it in a book. It's quite another to look at it on the palette and then the mini to confirm it worked. I'll take the hit of painting these areas twice because it was my mistake in the first place.

And what happened in the first place? I used the color I had mixed up for rust as the brown. It's a lovely color for rust. It's not a lovely color for leather.

I'll end this on a more humorous note. 

Competition painters and people who are more into the whole color theory aspect of painting miniatures can get hung up on browns. Really hung up. One whole drawer of my paints are nothing but browns. Brown is a serious color, even if it isn't a color.

Way back when I got here I would hang out and paint at a local game store, which has sadly been closed for many years. Someone I considered a friend would be there painting as well. He was as into color theory as I am. He has to be. He competes. I just do it because I'm that picky. But we were on the same page when it came to picking colors.

Whenever we would start talking about browns the other people from the group would say "They're talking about brown again" and tune us out. They didn't have nearly the same level of interest as we did. That got shortened to "The brown discussion" when it would come up at the paint table. I remember those days fondly because we would spend a lot of time finding exactly the right brown for the color palette. Even then I was pretty good at picking the right family of browns for the project at hand, if I do say so myself.