Color Harmony Using the Mother Color

3/17/2022

Guess what? I have a new YouTube video for you to watch, and it’s all about how to create color harmony using the mother color.

So, what is color harmony and what is the mother color?

When you’re painting, you strive to make your color palette harmonious because it’s so pleasing to the eye.

There are multiple ways to achieve color harmony in your painting, but my favorite way is using the mother color.

The mother color is a method of adding one particular color to each of the colors you mix on your palette.

Color harmony is a group of colors that work well together and are pleasing to the eye.

The term was coined by 20th century American landscape painter Edgar Payne.

There are four basic ways to achieve this:

  1. Tone your canvas or substrate with one color before putting anything else on top. That way all the colors will have some of the one color underneath them, which will help unify the painting.
  2. When you lay all your colors out on your palette, mix a small amount of one color (it could be any color) into all the colors on your palette. For instance, you could add blue to each of the colors, you could add red to each of them, but the important thing is that each color you mix will have a small amount of the same color.
  3. Once you mix colors on your palette take a small amount of one color, your mother color, and add that to each of your mixtures.
  4. As you mix colors on your palette, take a small bit from all the other colors and add that to each of your color mixtures.

If this seems confusing, then you’ll want to watch me demonstrate it in my new YouTube video which you can get right HERE.

Be sure not to overdo it. You just need to add a little bit of the mother color to achieve color harmony.

A super shortcut to be certain you have color harmony using the mother color is to premix colors you use most frequently, add a mother color to each of them and put that mixture in a container of some sort.

Personally, I premix mine and fill them into convenient plastic squeeze bottles.

That way I have them all on my painting table ready to go.

If you want to watch me explain and demonstrate how to get color harmony in your paintings using the mother color then click HERE to watch the video.

* Click HERE to learn about the Art with Adele Academy.

* Click HERE to get my FREE minicourse, “Kickstart Your Abstract Painting.”