Transparent vs. Opaque Colors

When it comes to working in oils or acrylics, understanding the transparency or opacity of your colours is crucial! Whether you work in layers as in painting with cold wax medium (oils and acrylics) or simply use a colour as a glaze or other painting technique, it is important to know whether your paint colour is TRANSPARENT or OPAQUE, WARM or COOL. In the video below, I'll show you how to recognise the transparency of your paints.

What you could do is make colour swatches in a sketchbook and write their properties (transparent, opaque, cool, warm) next to the swatch or you can simple mark a T or an O on your paint tube!

The transparent colours I can’t do without are:

• Sennelier Chinese Orange

• W&N Sap Green

• Gamblin Asphaltum

• Sennelier Alizarin Crimson

• Gamblin Brown Pink

  and of course

• Gamblin Phthalo Turquoise💙

Hope that you liked the tutorial! If you haven’t subscribed to my channel, please do so to get notifications of future videos! 🔔

If you want to dive deeper into colour mixing, are frustrated that you colours turn into mud, don’t know what single pigments paints are, then the Colour Mixing Bootcamp is certainly something for you! In this bootcamp we explore the colour wheel, colour values, colour temperature and more. Check out the class below!