Painting with only two colors! How to work with greys?

Primary colours:

These colors are primary and cannot be mixed. Instead, they give rise to more colors when added in various proportions.

Secondary colors:

These colors are derived by mixing primary colors in different proportions. Orange, purple, green, etc., are secondary colors that you can use while rendering acrylic paint on paper.

Tertiary colors:

These colors form the intermediate stages between primary colors and secondary colors. While mixing primary colors to derive secondary colors, you will get tertiary colors like red-purple and blue-purple, yellow-green and blue-green.

Analogous colors:

Analogous colors are close to each other on the color wheel. For example, the analogous shades of red are purple and orange.

Complementary colors:

Complementary colors are diametrically opposite on the color wheel and cannot be mixed because of high contrast. For example, the complementary shade of blue is orange, and red is green.

Each of these colors mentioned above has three characteristics in essential. Understanding these characteristics will help you while painting on paper and applying these colors in varying proportions to obtain the desired effect.

Hue:

Hue essentially points to the origin of the definite color and its family. The hue of color could be either red, yellow, blue, orange, purple, or green.

Value:

The value of color points to how dark or light the texture of the color is. This is highly important while acrylic painting on paper, as it is essential to obtain the right amount of value to indicate the depth, shade, luminance, and other factors that will make your painting life-like.

Chroma:

Chroma essentially points out the intensity of the color and indicates how bright or dull it is.

Creating grey with white and black:

This is the least favored method by artists, as it leads to a bland, flat shade of grey rather than a rich mix with several color biases. You can add white and black in varied proportions to obtain grey. However, you will be only restricted to these two colors and have a lesser range of greys to work with.

Creating grey with orange and blue:

Although this is harder than the method mentioned above, it creates rich mixes of grey with multiple undertones of color that can easily be adapted to each painting and matched with the other colors. You can use cadmium orange with varied shades of blue like ultramarine or cobalt and modify their proportions constantly to get the shade of grey you want.

Creating grey with red and green:

This is similar to the above, where you add phthalo green with cadmium red or naphthol crimson and increase the amounts of white to get the rich variant of grey that will adorn the paintings in your sketching pad.

Creating grey with purple and yellow:

Since purple and yellow are complementary colors, you can add them in ideal proportions to get a decent quality of black. Once you obtain that, increase the white to get the variant of grey that suits your needs. However, you might need to add yellow in varying amounts to correct the black obtained.

Creating grey by mixing brown with earth colors:

This is another tried-and-tested method where you use Vandyke brown/raw umber/burnt sienna or other brown variants with moderate to generous amounts of cobalt blue or ultramarine blue to obtain grey. Brown in itself is a ‘greyed down’ variant of red or orange. So you will get rich shades of grey using this method. You can make the grey lighter by adding decent amounts of white.