It’s often said that “mud” is the result of mixing too many colors, and therefore it’s tangentially a palette issue, particularly if there are a lot of paint on your palette.
Even Robert Gamblin for example, whose knowledge of paint I greatly admire, (he makes very good oil paint) implies that too many paints mixed together produce mud when he writes that certain pigments mixed together “quickly turn to mud.” It’s one of those misunderstanding like a three primary color palette that just continues and continues with a life of its own.
In fact, “mud” is a gray color like any other gray color that has occurred because of desaturation. It’s not surprising that mixing more than two colors would increase the saturation costs and lead to gray. Robert Gamblin makes and gives away free in the spring a Torrit gray (not “mud”, He runs a contest for the best picture done with it) that he describes this way:
“Every spring, Gamblin Artists Colors collects a wealth of pigments from our Torit® Air Filtration system. We filter the air around the areas where we handle dry pigments so that our workers are not exposed to pigment dust. Rather than sending any of our high quality, expensive pigments into the landfill, Gamblin paint makers recycle them into “Gamblin Torrit Grey”.”
I can’t help adding that Gamblin spells the color in the English way. ”Gray” and “grey” are both acceptable spellings, but “gray” tends to be used more in the United States. The best way to remember that “Grey is a colour” in England and “Gray is a color” in the United States is by saying to yourself ”A is for America” and E is for England.”
The point is, if “mud” is a gray, then it is not in itself a bad thing. The problem is often that it is around other very similar grayed colors or in a context that makes it look unattractive. If you were to put that mud color on white paper, you would find that it’s just another gray. You can put colors around it that work with it. Mud is, therefore, a value or color temperature design problem.
I have seen work (that is an entire canvas or paper) that people show as examples of how they got in trouble with”muddy” colors which looks like every single color in the painting is desaturated by mixing or using a dirty brush. I think it may result from inattention to using clean colors, to a failure to change solvent, not cleaning the palette, not washing brushes, and so forth. In other words being sloppy and, perhaps, lazy. Why don’t they see the mud and wipe off the passage and put down another color? Perhaps, they do not know that mud is not inevitable. It is also possible, as some people have suggested, that as we look at either the subject or our painting for long periods of time we become hyperaware of values and tend to make the shadows too complex (because we see into them too much) and have muddy passages because they begin to look better than they are on first glance. This would be an argument for taking a break, putting the painting away for a while, and so forth to get a fresher look.
The bottom line is there is no way to mix color to make “mud”. It’s not in the mixing. Seeing muddy color is an experience that occurs only when you put the color in place in a painting. You don’t see it on the palette. It is either the wrong value or the wrong color temperature for the passage in which it has been placed.
“Chalky” is another version of the problem which more often occurs in shadows which I think people understand better.
James Gurney has good discussion of the two school of thought (the “beware of mud” and “mud is a myth” school) here.
However, a “muddy” palette is another thing. This would mean a palette in which all the various paints have intermingled and desaturated each other. It would prevent you from having “clean”, that is saturated colors.
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