I love a painting with a beautiful off-white background. When I first started painting, many tutorials I followed used a mix of titanium buff and titanium white for a warm off-white. I soon tired of this mix, as it was too yellow for my tastes, not desaturated enough by black or gray or purple (the complement of yellow).
Then I discovered the trick to getting the warm yet grayed off-whites I love: diarylide yellow plus bone black, mixed into titanium white.
i ❤️ alabaster
I chose Sherwin-Williams Alabaster for the interior of my house when I moved in two years ago. Alabaster is a warm off white that is not too creamy, because the yellow is toned down with gray.
Using Golden’s online color mixer tool with an image of Alabaster from Sherwin-Williams’ website, I was able to determine a formula for mixing it with Golden paints.
Here’s an example of using the Golden tool with a photo grabbed from the Sherwin-Williams website. This formula uses a warmed up yellow (cadmiun yellow medium plus a touch of naphthol red light) plus some bone black mixed into a whole lot of white.
When I first used the tool sometime last year to find a mix for Alabaster, it gave me a different formula: diarylide yellow plus bone black plus titanium white. I didn’t have diarylide yellow at the time, but I tried it, and I find it extremely useful for mixing nice off-whites (in combination with some bone black and, of course, titanium white). I don’t use it on its own very often. It’s similar to India Yellow but not as translucent.
what my teacher taught me
Another favorite off-white that I use often is a touch of raw umber added to white. This is a “greige” (gray-beige) that abstract artist extraordinaire Adele Sypesteyn uses often. Look at that beautiful and neutral abstract floral painting she created! I attended a weeklong art retreat with Adele in Sausalito a couple years ago and she shared that raw umber plus white is one of her favorite neutrals.
To me, the colors I get with raw umber plus white perfectly represent how snow looks up in the mountains, when it is incompletely covering the ground. My Paymaster painting shows this effect, with multiple tints of raw umber in various areas of the painting. To my eye, this works better than my Alabaster mix in many of my abstract mountain landscapes.
If you don’t have raw umber, you can get a similar tint of raw umber using—guess what!—diarylide yellow with neutral gray (or, of course, by mixing your own gray with white and bone black):
I’ve been surprised how useful diarylide yellow has become in my painting.
Just a tip: start with just a little bit of black and a little bit of yellow. It’s easy to make it too dark to start and then you have to use up all sorts of white to get it back to the light color you wanted.