Watch & Learn
Free video tutorials from working artists that show color theory on the palette: violet shadows on a yellow banana, complements that darken without black, natural greens and believable skin tones. Each one links to a Pigmento lesson or mixer preset so you can practise right after.
by Ginger Cook (Learn to Paint) · YouTube ↗
A long, relaxed acrylic still-life session built around a bunch of bananas. The part most relevant here starts at 40:17, where purple and blue go into the shadows of the yellow fruit, letting the complement do the darkening instead of black. Later sections layer greens and yellows for volume and refine the highlights.
Shade yellow with violet in the mixerA short, clear color-theory lesson on what complementary colors are and why each pair has one warm and one cool color. It shows how a touch of the opposite color makes a more believable shadow than black or grey: purple on a banana, blue on an orange, green on an apple. It then looks at complements in paintings by Van Gogh and Monet.
Lesson: complementary colorsby Domestika English · YouTube ↗
In under three minutes, watercolor artist Sarah Stokes shows how to find a color's opposite on the wheel and mix it in to get a darker, more neutral shadow tone. It's a quick, practical demo of why a slightly "muddy" complement mix makes the bright colors around it look brighter.
Lesson: shadows without blackby Martha from iLove2Paint · YouTube ↗
A beginner-friendly acrylic lesson that starts from a simple drawn circle and turns it into an apple through shading and blending. It's a gentle way to practise placing highlights and shadows on a round form before trying more complex still lifes.
Try the sphere in the shadow generatorby Rachel Froud Art · YouTube ↗
A compact lesson on mixing light, medium and dark skin tones in acrylic from just five paints. It explains yellow, red and blue undertones, and why a little blue, orange's complement, makes skin look natural rather than over-saturated.
Lesson: how to mix skin tonesby JerrysArtarama · YouTube ↗
A two-minute oil demo matching a model's skin tone with yellow ochre, alizarin crimson and ultramarine blue. Watch how the orange base is calmed with its complement and deepened with a warm brown instead of black.
Try a similar mix in the mixerby Jackie Partridge Art · YouTube ↗
A beginner acrylic lesson on mixing a variety of greens for better landscape paintings. It's useful if your trees and fields all come out the same green. Pair it with our explanation of color bias.
Lesson: what colors make greenby Pat Fiorello · YouTube ↗
A brief watercolor demonstration of how to turn green straight from the tube into more natural-looking greens for landscapes. It's a good companion to the natural-greens section of our green lesson.
Mix a natural foliage greenHow do you get ochres and browns without earth pigments? This watercolor video mixes a range of yellow and brown hues from orange combined with primaries and secondaries, using complements and near-complements, while painting a mountain lion portrait.
Lesson: what colors make brownVideos belong to their creators and are embedded from YouTube in privacy-enhanced mode (youtube-nocookie.com). Nothing loads from YouTube's player until you press play, though thumbnails are fetched from YouTube's image servers. Pigmento isn't affiliated with these channels. Please support them by watching on YouTube and subscribing.