Name: Mack
Message: I've read several books and looked at many web sites and haven't found yet any simple formulas for mixing colors like peach, or teal using only 3 or 4 basic mixing colors. Do you think color wheels, like Dharma sells, are useful?

Most of those color wheels are useful more for thinking about combining different colors than in mixing them up to start with, but now there is a CMY color mixing wheel which might in fact be very useful.

The two most useful guides for a beginner, in my opinion, are Rupert Gibbon & Spider's color mixing chart (which unfortunately relies on several premixed colors, but it's still a good resource), which they will mail to you if you call and ask, and which can also be seen here under ""How can I mix Procion MX dyes to get specific colors?", and Olli Niemitalo's amazing Dye Mixer Applet, which lets you experiment online with color mixing in an extremely efficient way. Note that the Dye Mixer Applet dyes also includes some color mixtures; for example, there is no single-color green or black among the Procion MX dyes, but several are listed there.

I would not choose to mix all my colors starting with just three or four primaries, although it is theoretically possible. I like to use turquoise/magenta/lemon yellow for mixing brights, but I also need a dull orange and a dark navy for mixing darker colors. I like mixing magenta with a nice bright orange to get my own good medium bright red, and I love violet MX-2R (often sold under the misnomer of violet MX-G, which is meaningless and wrong), and I feel a strong need for several different pure blues, including blue MX-G (cerulean blue). blue MX-R (medium blue), and the Cibacron F brilliant blue. And I just do not even want to consider mixing my own black, even though I do usually mix all of my other colors from the fifteen or twenty pure unmixed colors I have on hand.

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