Colour Mixing

Pure Colour Dyes are perfect for mixing your own colours as resulting mixes are pure clean colours. There are infinite colour mixing possibilities and the colour range of eight dyes has been carefully developed with this in mind. Colour mixing can be as simple or as complex as you wish depending on your knowledge of colour mixing.

There are a number of ways of colour mixing:

	Over-dyeing the original colour e.g. dyeing yellow fabric with *blue* dye will give a *green* result. This method is often used in Batik where layers of colour are built up.
	Overlapping colours e.g. using the squirting on Tie-Dye method, where two colours merge
	Experimenting with a bespoke colour

The colour mixing rules are the same for all methods. Basic colour mixing is simple e.g. yellow and scarlet gives orange; these are called binary mixtures.

The table below shows the colours obtained by mixing 1:1 ratios of the core range of Pure Colour Dyes. The results were achieved using 2 level small spoons of each dye colour on 250g of fabric, using the basic dyeing method.

More advanced colour mixing involves:

	Different proportions of binary mixtures
	Mixing more than two colours
	Varying the overall strength of colour

The results below were achieved using the number of level small spoons (shown in each section) of each dye colour on 250g of fabric, using the basic dyeing method; e.g. 1Y 2T means 1 level small spoon of Yellow and 2 level small spoons of Turquoise.

Different colours can be obtained by using the same proportions of dye, but less dye overall. The example below uses the same colours and proportions as in triangle 1, but half the quantities of dye.

Of course the variations shown are only the tip of the iceberg. Changing one or all of the colours in the trangle will give a whole new range of colours - the possibilities are endless!

The use of black in place of turquoise produces much duller colours. This is called 'shading' as illustrated in triangle 3 below.

Tips for colour mixing.

	Replacing Magenta with Scarlet in the colour triangle gives much brighter Oranges when mixed with Yellow but much duller Violets when mixed with Turquoise.
	Adding small amounts of black gives duller colours.
	Adding small amounts of Orange to Yellow gives golden yellows.
	Adding Scarlet gives warmer colours.
	Using Navy as the blue component in mixes will give darker colours e.g. Navy mixed with Yellow will give dark green; using Turquoise will give brighter colours e.g. Turquoise mixed with Yellow will give a lime green.