Why I Still Mix My Own Neutrals

It would be faster to buy a tube of neutral grey. I don’t, and the reason comes down to how a mixed neutral behaves next to the other colors in a painting.

A grey mixed from the same pigments already on my palette — say, a touch of the sky blue and the earth orange from the same painting — carries a subtle relationship to everything else in the piece. A tube grey doesn’t; it just sits there, flat and unrelated.

It’s a small thing, and most people looking at a finished painting couldn’t tell you why one passage feels more alive than another. But I think they can feel it.