The Decorative Folk Artist October 2017 | Page 3

Colour matching A useful tip from Sarah Webley I often decide to paint a pattern and find it uses a colour that I don’t have, and I don’t want to order it and have to wait until it arrives - because I want to paint it now! So I often mix my own colour. I’ve found the easiest way to start is to look up the colour on a paint chart online and also look up the nearest colour I have to it. When you have to scroll up and down it’s not easy to compare them so I take a screen shot of each colour (I use Screenhunter 6 * which is easy to use and free) and paste them into a document. It is then easy to enlarge them side by side and compare them. I can then see what I need to add to the colour I have in order to get a reasonable approximation of the colour I want. I know that it is notoriously difficult to use online charts for true colours, but then a lot of us use printed patterns that are not necessarily printed true to colour either - and this works well enough for me! Here’s an example: I want Toffee and the nearest I have is Antique White. I can see that I need to lighten