How to get a good Auburn hair color. Please help

by Anthony Foster
(Long Beach, Ca)

I'm painting Andrea Minitures, "Where's the Fire? For a friend and she has requested that I give the girl hair color similar to hers. Her hair color is an Auburn, red with some brown to it. I'm having a hard time coming up with a close match for the Auburn, what color mix combinations do you suggest?

Anthony

SMH Answers

Without a doubt model builders could easily spend a lifetime exploring the results of mixing paints to get specific colors, there are just so many possible results from mixing two or three colors together.
One man’s auburn, for instance, is another man’s rust and what one individual sees as rust. What one calls chestnut, another refers to be as being hazel-colored. What one person sees as burnt sienna, another sees as reddish brown.
If it was only a question of what you call the color by decreeing this particular color will always be called auburn.
But what do you call the same color that has a little more red or a little more brown?
In the final analysis the “that’s it!” decision will be made by your girl friend not you.
A general formula for creating brown is one part red, one part blue and a little yellow, but how much of each will depend on what you and your girlfriend recognize. You can make a substantial change with just a drop or two difference in any of the primary or secondary colors involved.
To be more specific, you can use the formula part of burnt umber, three parts of golden ochre and twenty parts of white lead (I n art, lead white is known as flake white, also sometimes known as Cremnitz white.)

It depends on how artistic you want to get.

Things to remember when mixing paints:

1. Get Out your paints (I find you can mix brands as long as you stay within the acrylic or oil-based paint families.
2. Use a color wheel It will help you learn to mix paints to get the colors you want. (There is one in the Download Center).

Color mixing adds detail and excitement to your work. It is a very good visual tool that demonstrates the relationship between the different types of colors of the spectrum.

Learn the three elementary divisions of color:

• Primary colors are red, blue, yellow. These are the three 'starter' pigments and can’t be created using any other combination of colors, hence the term 'primary'.

• Secondary colors are orange, purple, green. They are the products of the three combinations of primary colors.

• Tertiary colors are those that involve all three primary colors (red, yellow and blue) in some combination or another.

4. Recognize the various hues of a color. All colors have various shades and are either 'warm' or 'cool'. Warm colors are prominent and bold, whereas cool colors are subdued and sober.
Traditionally, yellow, orange and red are considered warm colors while blue, green and purple would be classified as “cool”.
5. Create a color grid. Use a piece of water color paper and mark of a grid with several blocks. In each block, place a splotch of your one of your “created colors with the “recipe” (measured color combinations) beneath it.

Now, you and your girlfriend take the grid out into the sunlight and wait for her to exclaim, “That’s It”.