Why Your Colors Turn to Mud
Mud is not a color you pick by mistake. It is what happens to a mix, and you can stop it.
Every painter has been warned about muddy colors at some point. Be careful, don't make mud. So you paint on guard, as if mud were a color sitting on a shelf that you might pick up by mistake one day.
But mud is not a color. You can't buy it in a tube. Mud is something that happens to a color on the way from the tube to the canvas.
And that is actually good news. If it happens while you mix, you can stop it while you mix.
I made a video about it. It covers three rules that keep your color clean, and at the end I take one pile of mud and make the same color twice: once by trying to save it, and once by starting again.
What muddy colors really are
The video opens with two piles. One is a clean mix of yellow ochre, vermilion and white. The other is mud.
First, the mud is less bright. Its chroma has dropped. Chroma is the strength of a color, how much color there is in it.
But that's only half of it. The mud also went darker and heavier. Its value went somewhere I never asked it to go.
So for me, mud is both of those things at once: the chroma and the value going down together. When that happens, the color loses its clarity.
A color can be quiet and still be clean. A beautiful gray can be clean. Most of the colors in a portrait are quiet colors. Mud is a color that lost its chroma and its value, and nobody asked it to.
So mud is not a color you choose. It's what happens when you lose control of the mix. And the first way to lose control is the most innocent one, because it doesn't feel like making mud at all. It feels like fixing.
Rule one: fewer colors in a mix
When a mix doesn't look right, it's so tempting to fix it with one more tube. A little blue to cool it down. A little black to make it darker. Then something else to fix what the blue did.
So in the video I do exactly that, one small fix at a time:
I start with the clean mix: yellow ochre, vermilion and white.
It feels a little too warm, so a touch of ultramarine blue.
Now it's gone a bit dark, so a little more white. It's already less bright than it was.
It feels too pink, so a touch of viridian to calm the red down.
Now it's too light, so a little ivory black.
It looks a bit dull, so some cadmium red to bring it back to life.
Every step was a small fix, and every fix made sense. Together, they made mud.
Why more tubes make mud
Paint gets its color by taking light away. Every tube swallows part of the light and gives you back the rest.
So every time you put another tube into the mix, it takes away its share of the light too. More tubes means less light coming back. The color gets duller and darker at the same time, and that is exactly what mud is.
So how many colors should go into one mix? You'll often hear: never more than three.
Well, three is a very good habit, but it's not a magic number. Every tube on the palette has a job, and inside a single mix it's the same. Every tube that goes in needs a job. If you can't say what a tube is doing in your mix, it shouldn't be there.
Rule two: quiet a color with a color
When you want to quiet a color down, reach for a color, not for black.
Black looks like the easy answer. It's dark, it looks neutral, and it takes the brightness out. But in my experience, black makes the mix dirty. It brings the chroma down, but it takes the life out of the color with it.
To show it, I split the clean mix in two. Into one half goes a little ivory black. Into the other goes a little burnt umber, the tube I reach for most of the time. I bring both down to the same value, as close as my eye can place it.
Then I check myself. I take a photo and take all the color out of it. In black and white, the two piles are the same. So the difference you see isn't light and dark. It's how clean the color is.
Burnt umber is my workhorse. It brings the chroma down and the value down together, and it mixes well with almost everything. When I want a color to stay very clean, on jewelry or on clothes, I go to the opposite color instead.
This doesn't mean black is a bad tube. I use black. I just don't use it as a switch to turn color off. For me, black is an ingredient. I even make the green I use for portraits out of it, with yellow ochre, but that's a story for another time.
So to quiet a color, use a color.
Rule three: don't rescue it, remix it
This is the rule that saves the most paint and the most time, even though it doesn't feel like it. When a mix has gone dead, don't try to save it. Remix it.
In the video I go back to the mud from those seven fixes and try to save it, the way we all want to.
It was too dark, so I added white. Now it was lighter, but not cleaner. It was just lighter mud. It needed warmth, so a little vermilion. Warmer now, but still dead. And the pile kept getting bigger. Every fix made more paint, and none of that paint was clean.
So here's what I do. If a mix has gone dead, I put it aside and start fresh. I know it feels like a waste of paint, but the rescue already used more paint than starting again would, and the color still isn't right.
The paint that's left at the end of the day, I leave on the palette. The next morning I check how fresh it still is. If it's fresh, I use it. If it's not, it goes.
Some painters keep all their leftover paint and use it as a gray. It can work. But that's a gray you made on purpose, for a job. Mud is a color that went somewhere you didn't send it. A quiet color that you chose is not mud.
Rescued vs remixed, side by side
At the end of the video, I make the color we started with again, from scratch: yellow ochre, vermilion and white. If I want it a little quieter, a touch of burnt umber - a color and not black. Every tube in it has a job.
Then the two piles sit side by side: the mix I tried to save and the mix I started again. It's the same color I was aiming for both times. The only difference is how I got there.
If you remember one thing, remember this. Mud is what happens to a mix that gets too many tubes, gets quieted with black, or gets rescued instead of remixed.
What to do with this
The next time a mix goes wrong at the easel, stop before you reach for another tube. Ask what job each tube already in the pile is doing. If you can't answer, or the pile has gone dead, put it aside and mix it again from scratch, with only the tubes that have a job.
I hope this helped. Which color always turns into mud for you? Tell me in the comments under the video - I read every comment. You are welcome to subscribe to the channel.
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