Watercolor Color Mixing Recipes

The definitive color-mixing resource for watercolor artists, Watercolor Color Mixing Recipes: Card Deck & Color Mixing Grid offers a portable, studio-ready update to William F. Powell’s trusted system. 

This travel-friendly toolkit translates William F. Powell’s proven method into 35 sturdy cards, a booklet, and a reusable acetate color mixing grid for precise, repeatable blends. Built for watercolor’s unique needs, each card presents a finished swatch, exact pigment proportions, and helpful notes on dilution/values so you can match a target hue and its light-to-dark range quickly. 

With a find-follow-measure-mix workflow, you’ll locate a color in the guidance index (say, flamingo pink, seashell white), follow the numbered recipe, measure on the acetate grid, and blend a clean, reliable mix—ready for washes, glazing, or fine detail.

Follow these four simple steps to mix more than 400 color combinations:

1. Look in the Color Guidance Index in the booklet for the subject you want to paint—for example, “Eucalyptus Bark.”
2. Find the Color Recipe Card with the subject’s recipe number (“293”) and an example of the actual paint mixture.
3. Use the Color Mixing Grid to measure each paint color.
4. Mix the color.

It’s that easy! Perfect for students, teachers, plein air, and studio watercolorists alike, the deck’s compact format shines in all settings where speed and clarity matter. Because every recipe is visually verified and ratio-based, you can recreate favorite hues day after day, across papers and palettes, without guesswork. Whether you’re painting landscapes, still lifes, or people, this portable system brings confidence to color choice and control—keeping your attention on timing, edges, and brushwork while the color math stays simple and repeatable.

Walter Foster’s bestselling Color Mixing Recipes series also includes Color Mixing Recipes for Watercolor, Color Mixing Recipes for Oil & Acrylic, Color Mixing Recipes for Portraits, and Color Mixing Recipes for Landscapes. These books contain hundreds of precise color mixing combinations for realistic results, as well as two acetate grids for measuring paint units.