It is good to be back!

You may have noticed (or not) that I was "missing" for almost 6 months. If this newsletter is no longer relevant to you, and you are not interested in painting with acrylics, gouache, oil pastels, markers, and crafting, I will understand if you unsubscribe (at the bottom).

If you're still on board, great, I will be coming back with some more kids' content (specifically crafts) to share with you more amazing crafter and blogger out there, color mixing, pouring, and painting tips.

And I am preparing to be a speaker for hobbies and crafts summit, if you have specific questions in mind about painting with acrylics, reply to this email and I will answer them in my presentation.

And if you're completely confused who am I...

I’m Masha, I’m in my early 30s and I travel the world. I am a self-taught abstract artist passionate about acrylics, pouring, oil pastels, and gouache.

I have a blog and Youtube, and you probably did my 3-day starter on painting.

I work full time and sometimes don't have time to do a deep clean or forget to wash my brushes but well, it's life and nobody is perfect!💜

Brown and its shades

To get back to business... Someone asked me on Youtube to show what do red and green make when mixed. Well, in a perfect world, they make brown.

To get a perfect chocolate brown, it is best to mix warm red and warm green. You can see a quick video here:

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Now, to make it lighter, we can use white. But white sometimes makes brown...well, too light and kinda pastel.

To avoid that, you can mix brown with a bit of warm orange (Cadmium orange) and it will really lighten it up slowly. Like here:

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Now, if you keep adding more orange, at some point, warm orange will start to interact more with the warm red in the mix. And the brown shades start to lean towards redder tone.

So.

If you want to make brown just a touch lighter - use orange (or sometimes darker yellow can work).

If you want to make brown significantly lighter - use white (or sometimes pink for skin colors)

See you next week!