Episode 150: Want Your Colors to Look Like Fine Art? The Magic is in The Mud!

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0:30Hey, real quick, I've got an amazing offer for you. For a limited time, I'm offering my three most popular programs for one giant discount. So with this bundle, you get the Color Course for Rebels, which is my signature course that thousands of artists have taken from around the world. It totally is a game changer for your art. I'm also offering you my video of the top 10 abstract art techniques to immediately elevate your art. And then finally, I'm offering you the

1:00Mother Color bonus course. And that is where I take 10 of my most popular paintings and I teach you the exact color mixing for each one of those paintings. So these courses alone would be unbelievable, but when you get them all together, it's everything you may need to make fine art. All of it's only for $197 and it's available from May 4th to May 17th. So I hope you'll take advantage of this offer. Okay, you guys, I have a huge workshop announcement. Right now, I am

1:34announcing I've got one workshop available in October. It's the Honest Art Workshop and it's the only one I've offered in the U.S. in 2026. It's going to be here in Austin, Texas in October. We'll put more information in the show notes for you. But then in addition to that, I am announcing that we're going to Australia. So I'm hosting a workshop in Australia in February of 2027 with our host, Jody Gere of the House of Gere. This is going to be taking place in just south of

2:07Melbourne on the Mornington Peninsula. And I'm so, so excited. So if you want to learn more about these two workshops, please go to the link in show notes, find out soon because these workshops sell

Workshop Announcement

2:18out so, so fast and I would love to see you there. Welcome back to the Honest Art Podcast, everyone. I am your host, Jody King. I'm so excited about this episode because it's basically one of the things that I have, it's affected my entire business. And that is that the magic is in the mud when we are painting. Now, if that doesn't make sense to you, then likely you have never been

2:54in a painting and you've got wet paint and it turns to mud. So if this has never happened to you, this might become as quite a surprise. But oftentimes when we are painting, especially when we're mixing paints on a canvas, it will turn to mud. Now, I've got great, great news for you. And if you have taken the color course for Rebels, you know this. If you're in any of my online programs, you know this. But the magic is in the mud. That is where the really good stuff happens. Now, I didn't

3:26always know this. I have been a professional artist for 22 years and I can tell you so that probably for the first five years that I was painting, I didn't know this concept. Also, I was riddled with self-doubt because I had never gone to art school. And I knew that color was so important for us if we, especially if we want to create fine art. I mean, color is fun in general. Like, who doesn't love

3:58color? But when we want to start creating fine art, we really have to have a good command of color. And frankly, I didn't want to go take color theory classes. I wasn't able to at the time, but I also didn't want to. So I would buy books on color theory and they would be big and thick and I would get even more overwhelmed just with what I was reading. So thankfully, over the course of years, I was able

4:30to really get this nailed down so that I now have a solid, solid command of color mixing and I teach it to everyone in the color course for rebels. But I want to teach you a few of the things that are in that course right now because they're super, super important. Now, before I get into that, I just want to say, if you're listening to this on a platform, you might want to scoot over to YouTube because I'm going to be doing a lot of demonstrations. But aside from that, before I get into this mud mixing color

5:05stuff, I want to tell you that along the way, over the years, I also came to know and to understand and to experience that there are four elements that make fine art. And I, you guys have heard me say this before, I like to think of them like the four legs of a table, okay? And with a table, if you've got four legs and even one of them is a little wobbly, just a little imperfect, it can ruin a whole meal,

5:36right? It can throw the whole thing off. So of those four table legs, one of them is color cohesiveness. The others are values and composition and the voice of the artist, so, so important. But the fourth one is color cohesiveness. So that's how important it is to have a good command

Color Cohesiveness

5:58of color. So without further ado, let's get messy.

6:10Okay, I get it. You love color. I love color. I'm sure you've had the experience of walking into an art supply store and going over to the paint section and seeing all of those gorgeous paints lined up on the wall and your heart starts to beat fast. And then, you know, we start grabbing, oh, I don't have that one. Oh, I don't have that one. I don't have that one. I've been there. I get it. I know this. But by the end of this video, what you're going to see is that you're going to be able to save so much money on paints because we're going to be mixing our own super, super unique colors. Okay, now,

6:47just to get us started, I want to show you that you maybe you're somebody like me who when you first start painting, you're using a lot of fully saturated colors straight out of the tube. So I've done a demonstration here. These are obviously red, yellow, and blue, straight out of the tube, very vibrant, very saturated, right? And there's nothing wrong with that. But when we're talking about really elevating our art, that means that we need to be able to have a clear understanding of how you

7:21work with fully saturated colors like we see here, but then also incorporating some less saturated colors. Because what happens is in a painting, when you have fully saturated colors, those colors are going to come to the foreground, and less saturated colors are going to go to the background. But even more than that, if you love color, you especially need to be working with colors that are a little more

7:52neutral or a little less saturated, because that actually makes the fully saturated colors pop so much more. So think of it like this. These are all very saturated, very loud colors, okay? But the thing is, is that when you have fully saturated, and you're doing a painting, and everything is saturated, it's like a table, like a conversation at a restaurant, and everybody is talking really loud, okay? Really loud talkers

8:29here. And, but when we put in some less saturated colors, a little more neutral, then we can have more communication, and the communication just gets elevated. So for this painting, what I'm going to do right here, is I have mixed up some less saturated colors here. I also changed some values, which you guys know, I've talked about values a lot, and I'm going to be talking about values a little bit more very soon. But I have mixed up some paint here, where it is, it is much less saturated than these. And I just

9:04want to show you what happens when you can put these less saturated colors, look at that, next to these fully saturated colors. It really elevates the whole thing. Hey, real quick while I've got you, I just want to tell you, I know that being an artist can be a lonely job, and filled with self-doubt. So artists need other artists, and we need painting techniques, and the skills to sell our art along with it. So that's

9:39why I created the best membership group of artists on the planet, called the Honest Art Society. And in it, you receive several coaching calls a month with me, so that you can get your questions answered on business and on your art. You get monthly trainings from art techniques to marketing and business. You get exclusive art critiques, as well as exclusive discounts on workshops and courses. And all of this is for only $47 a month, and you can cancel at any time. So if you're ready to make your best art

10:14ever, along with a great community of amazing artists, I hope you'll join me in the Honest Art Society, and you can find out more at the link in the show notes. Okay, there we go. All right, so now you can see that just being able to offer a little bit of a little more neutral color, a little less saturation, really has the ability to elevate the piece dramatically. Now there's still so many things

10:45you can do to this piece to make it more interesting, but just to show you what a difference it makes when you can juxtapose a fully saturated next to a less saturated color. Now one of the things that I'm about to show you when we're mixing is one of the things I did to get this is that I used some of these colors in my color mixing technique. I used some of this. This actually looks like it's black, but it's these colors together with a burnt umber, and I mix those together with a little bit of blue to get

11:23this background. So the way to desaturate colors or to create more neutrals is usually by mixing them together. You just got to know which colors to mix together, which again, that's all in the Color Course Rebel, which is on sale for not the entire month of May, but we'll put all the information in the show notes. Okay, so we've got this, but now let's talk about what you can do when you're in your studio to create colors that are a little less saturated. A lot of the times when we are learning about color,

12:04especially if you go to a university level or maybe if you're reading your books, it's an awful lot of talk about being very familiar with the color wheel. I don't disagree with that at all. I think just knowing what colors are complementary and what colors are not are very, very helpful, but usually when we start with color mixing, one of the rules, don't like rules, but we're going to just stay with me for this. So anyway, one of the things is to use complementary colors. So that's what we're going to do,

12:38but we're going to take it up a notch. Okay, so if we're looking at complementary colors, we're looking at colors that are on the opposite side of the color wheel. Oh, please, let me get this thing to spin. Oh, I've got some paint on it. Yeah, this is how you know it's not AI. It's real life. Okay, here we go. Let me get this thing to spin. All right, got it. Got it. Okay, so if we are looking at colors on the

13:09opposite side of the color wheel, we've got blue here and we've got orange here. Okay, I hope that didn't get blurry. But anyway, so that's what we're going to do. We're going to take two colors on the opposite side of the color wheel and we are going to mix them together. So I've got some blue here, cobalt blue, and I'm going to put it on the tray so you guys can see that. And then I've got its complement, which is orange, and we are going to put orange here. Okay, so now we have these. Now,

13:49you know for sure on a painting, these are going to look great because they are complementary colors, right? They're on the opposite side of the of the color wheel. So here we go. But what we want to do next is we want to make mud. All right, because when we make mud, we are going to have the ability to make so many cool colors. So we're going to take a little bit of this orange. And we are going to grab some blue. And we are going to make mud. Look at that.

14:31You guys see that kind of baby poop, dirty mud color. So now we've got mud. That's exciting, right? Don't you feel like exciting? I can see you guys getting excited over there. All right, so but it doesn't stop there. Ready? Now we are going to take this mud and we're going to put it into these beautiful colors that we love so much. But when we do so, you're going to see how it's going to elevate them. Okay, so I'm going to leave some of that orange, like the pure saturated orange. I'm

15:07going to leave some of that there. And I'm going to mix this. And you'll be able to see just how much it changes because I'm going to put it up on that white canvas behind you. It'll be a little more obvious to you. So again, this color, it's so interesting, so sophisticated. Okay, and now we're going to take the mud and we're going to put it into the blue. Very, oh, that is such a cool blue.

15:43I feel like I had a car this color in 1986. All right, let's see. All right, let's put our two colors up here where we started. All right. So we've got this orange, very, very orange. This is the fully saturated version. And we've got this fully saturated blue. All right, now watch what happens

16:15when I go in. I'm going to create some values with this, with these colors. So I'm going to use white, black, and gray. Do it quickly. I could create some values with this and I'm going to show you what kind of colors we can get. You're going to be so excited. Okay, so I mixed my colors. I told you it was going to be exciting. All right, so I started with the orange and in the blue, I mixed up this mud here. And then I went on to create my values. So with the orange, I've got a light value

16:48and a dark value. And then this medium value, same for here with the blue. I've got a light value, probably hard to see, but light value, medium value, and dark value. But let me show you. We started with two. Do you remember I was saying like you can go to that wall and see all the pretty colors or you can make them to yourselves? This is a game changer. Okay, so we started with this orange

Color Mixing Demonstration

17:11and now this is the orange that we created that was slightly elevated. So sorry, I got some blue on my finger. That's right. So this is a just a little bit more kind of a rusty orange. Very, very, very warm, beautiful though. And then we've got our light value, which is kind of like a like a creamsicle sort of

17:44color. And then this beautiful neutral gray. And then this dark value here. This is a very much of like a chocolate brown. Absolutely gorgeous. We're going to take a photo of this. So if you can't, because I'm standing in the way. So if you can't see, if you can't see them, we're going to get a photo for you. All right. So then we had the blue, right? So the blue is a different color. See the difference

18:14between those two? Very different. And then we've got the light value. Beautiful, icy, gorgeous color. And then a neutral bluish gray. And then this navy, very, very dark navy color. But wait, we're not finished. Okay. So now we've got the mud that we're also working with. And so let me put some of that here. That finger still has lots of blue paint on it. So we've got that mud. Then we've got the

18:52neutral version light value with the gray. And then this is just a gorgeous, gorgeous dark kind of olive green color. So again, we're going to, we're going to take a photo of that for you. But notice what happened here is we went from this, you know, just these really, really bright primary colors, nothing wrong with it. Like I said, we all love color, but we want to elevate our color. And in order

19:25to do that, the magic is in the mud. So because of the mud, this is what we were able to do. So we've got, we went from two colors. We went to, so we've got one, two, now we've got three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 colors that are so, so cool. And this is all available to you once you really have an understanding of, of the mud and also have an understanding of how important

19:57color cohesiveness is. Okay. So yes, we can love all of the colors, but that doesn't mean all of the colors go together. All right. Unless you use my color mixing method. Sorry. I have to keep saying that because it's so, it's such a game changer. I hope this was really helpful for you. If you really do want to elevate your, not only your color cohesiveness, not only the mud, but if you want to really dive into the other table legs, the other elements of fine art, which are values and

20:31composition and finding your voice as an artist, the Color Course for Rebels gives you all of that. And we have this amazing deal right now. When you get the Color Course for Rebels 101 and 102, you also get the, my 10, 10 tips for abstract paintings. The whole video I did on that, which people have said have been incredibly helpful. And then the other thing is I take the paintings that I had the most requests on, like how did you make those color combinations,

21:03turned it into a whole value bonus course called the Mother Color. And that is available to you as well when you purchase the Color Course for Rebels. So I hope you'll do that. If you already know all about all the things and don't even worry about it, but if you don't, I would love to have you join me. Okay. Until next time, take good care of yourselves and each other. Peace out.