The gray-brown of August foothills
Last lesson covered what makes mud so you can control it. This one is where that control gets put to work — because knowing how to avoid mud is only half of it. Around here, in late summer, mud is the color you actually need. Drive up toward the canyon in August and look at the foothills. They're not green. They're a dusty, faded gray-brown, like the color got tired. That's not a mixing mistake; it's the actual color of dry grass and dust and August light doing its thing. Paint those hills bright green because "hills should be green" and it's going to look wrong, and you won't know why. So today we're mixing that color on purpose.
What you're actually mixing
Gray-brown foothill color is basically a warm color, a cool color, and a little bit of "don't be precious about it."
My go-to combo is a burnt sienna or burnt umber (whatever your warm brown is) mixed with a touch of your ultramarine or another cool blue. Not equal parts — mostly brown, blue along for the ride. If you've only got the basic six colors, this still works; you're just using less blue than you think you need.
- Load your brush with the brown first and get a good puddle going on the palette, not just a damp swipe.
- Bring in the blue a tiny bit at a time, mixing as you go, and watch the color change. Too little blue and it just looks like brown. Too much and it goes purple-gray, which is a different mood entirely — more like a storm coming than a hot dry afternoon.
You're aiming for the color of a paper grocery bag that's been left in the sun too long. That's genuinely the mental image I use. If you get there, heck yes, you found it.
Why this happened to me by accident
I did not discover this color on purpose, for the record. Leonardo did, when he was three. He got into my paints one afternoon while I wasn't watching closely enough and — being three — decided the correct move was to mix every single pan together into one big puddle. All of them. Reds, yellows, blues, the works, swirled into one gray-brown mess in the water cup and half over my palette too. I was annoyed for about ten seconds. Then I looked at the puddle he'd made and thought, huh, that's actually the exact color of the hills behind our house in August. So now, when I want that color, I sort of chase what he did by accident: mostly brown-family colors with everything else muddying it down. If a toddler can stumble into a genuinely useful color by wrecking your palette, that tells you something about how forgiving this particular mud is to make.
Painting a strip of it
- Tape a small piece of that cheap paper (you know the drill by now — cheap paper first, always, don't drag out the good stuff for a color test) and mark off a horizontal strip, maybe three inches tall.
- Mix your gray-brown puddle bigger than you think you need. Small mixes run out mid-wash, and then you're mixing a second batch that doesn't quite match. I do this every single time and every single time I'm annoyed about it.
- Lay it down as a flat wash, or, for more interest, graded — darker and denser at the bottom of the strip, lighter and thinner up top, the way real hills fade a little toward the top edge in haze.
- While it's still wet, drop a slightly darker version of the same mix into a few spots — just touch the brush down and let it bloom. Real hillsides aren't one flat color; they've got shadow patches, scrub brush, the occasional darker gully. This is wet-on-wet doing the work for you, same as we practiced before, except now it's landscape instead of a demo square.
- Let it dry flat. Remember it'll set fast in this air, faster than you expect if you learned from a tutorial filmed somewhere humid. Don't chase it around with the brush once it's started drying or you'll get hard edges you didn't want.
The opinion part
Stated straight out: mud is fine. It's not a mistake to fix, it's a color to learn. Most beginners spend their whole first year terrified of mixing "wrong" and end up with paintings that are all clean, bright, primary colors and nothing that looks like anything real. Real landscapes are full of grayed-down, muddy, complicated colors. Learning to make mud on purpose is one of the more useful things you'll do in this whole class.
One small caution, not a big one: if you're mixing a lot of colors together in one water cup over and over, rinse your brush properly between loads or your "clean" water turns into a second mud puddle real fast, and then everything you paint after that has a gray cast to it whether you want it or not.
Before next time: find a photo of a hillside — ours or somewhere else, doesn't matter — and just mix the color before you even pick up a brush for real. Get the puddle right first.