Saturday, March 25, 2006

Olives and Khakis From Delta Ceramcoat Paints


I use mostly Delta Ceramcoat paints. I like most of them and they are definitely cheap. The big downsides for me are that some, like yellows and oranges, are often translucent and they lack modern military colors like olive and khaki.



I decided to get around this by mixing my own olives and khakis. I was going to purchase black, yellow and orange from higher-quality artist paints. Before doing so, at $6 each, I looked through the Delta Ceramcoats and saw that they now do an opaque yellow and a semi-opaque tangerine! At 87 cents each, you just can't beat it, so I snatched some up (along with other primary colors) and took them home. I know some more advanced painters like translucent colors, but they are very annoying to me. I want to paint the color I want to paint and only do it one time. I think the results work well enough that any more effort or money spent would get only a small gain in quality.
I was surprised to read recently that olive is a mixture of black and yellow. I bought a color wheel and fooled around with it, noting that khakis look like black with yellow-orange. So, using my new DC paints, I made a little color chart showing one drop of black with varying numbers of yellow and orange drops. The colors aren't quite right in the photograph, but pretty close, and you can get an idea about how the colors mix.



The olives mostly run across the top, with more yellow than orange. The center of the chart, with more orange, contain the khaki colors. the bottom of the chart, with much more orange than yellow, is mostly browns.

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