Why I Love To Mix Cyan Blue With Ultramarine

I made a discovery when I decided to take a chance. I was painting the butterfly above and I needed the aforementioned bright, but deep blue for the butterfly's wings. I knew no premixed color that I had would cut it. I thought, though, what if I mix cyan with ultramarine?

I start with cyan, because I want that to be the dominant color. I put a generous amount of it on my palette, ​then I squirt some ultramarine next to it, and using either a palette knife or a brush, I slowly add the ultramarine into the cyan until I get the color I desire.

Okay, so this color mixing experiment worked out, but what if it hadn't. That would've been fine and I explain why in this post.

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I remember wishing I had some cyan in watercolor when I did this painting, because I thought it would be perfect to mix with the ultramarine I had for the water. I seem to remember finding a tube of cerulean that I didn't know I had after going out and getting one after finishing this piece.

Here are swipes of cyan mixed with ultramarine in watercolor, both in wet-on-dry and wet-on-wet.

While ultramarine tends to be my go-to blue, I do find cyan to be a very pretty color, I used for the sky in my painting, "Mountains Over A Lake In Silverton",

and for Adelaya's top in my painting, "Mother Sitting With Child".

I saw another artist that I watch on Youtube, Sayanti Chadhauri, who's channel is Sayanti Fine Arts, do a painting on her channel that involved layering streaks of ultramarine and cyan on top of eachother to paint water. That inspired me to try that out for myself. Here's the result.

I started to like this combo the more I looked at it.

I had learned through Facebook that mixing cerulean with raw umber gives a nice blue gray color. I'm a curious person, so I had to try it out.

I mixed a little bit of raw umber into some cerulean, than a bit more raw umber into the cerulean, and a little cerulean into some raw umber. I really like the first two shades, but I'm not so sure about the last one.