Having done reverse glass painting for eight years, I still find that there are some things to learn. The one very best thing that can be learned about is colors, and how they affect each other. One of the most important aspects of any painting, is how the colors play on each other. Sometimes, it can really be a process getting the right ones! If you just want to stick with the basics, that will make things so much easier until you have enough experience to feel your way through it. So, here are the basics.
Glass painting, and mixing colors are something you want to know about.
If you are going to do some glass painting, it helps a lot to know something about colors to make the most of it. Why spend hours painting every spot on a cheetah if you may not even be able to see it if the background ends up too dark? Make your colors work for you! There are only three primary colors. Red, Blue and Green are the only colors that can not be mixed from any other colors. Likewise, there are only three secondary colors. If two primary colors are mixed together in equal proportions, the end result will be a secondary color. Orange is made from red and yellow, two of the primaries. Green is made from blue and yellow, and violet is made from red and blue. There is a multitude of intermediate colors. These are also called tertiary colors, but I said we would keep it simple, so let us just call them intermediate. This would be a primary color mixed with a secondary color. A few examples of this would be blue green, peach, and mauve. Red , orange and yellow are called warm, or aggressive colors. The cool, or receding colors are blues, greens and violets. A tint is a color plus white. A tone is a color plus grey. A shade is a color plus black. The value is the lightness or darkness of a color. All right! If you can get that part down you are half way there! The second part of this journey is putting this in action!
For the main subject of the painting, try, as much as possible, to use primary and intermediate colors. Keep these colors as strong as you can! Even though blue is usually thought of as a receding color, it is also primary. You can use it for up close and personal type things! If later on in the painting, you want the blues to recede, you are going to need to mix the blue paint to make a tone, a plus grey color. The warm colors, the color that is pure, and demands to be seen, will be used only in minimal amounts as the back ground recedes. Only where it is really needed!
For the less important things in the painting, the background, let it do just that. Let it recede. Dull the colors down. Let it recede with the tones. My plan is to write more on the tones later, but for now we are going to keep it simple. As the back ground of the painting recedes, the colors will become lighter, hence, only tints of the colors that you started with. If you will allow the background to be behind the main topic of the painting, the human eye will see it as being so much more natural! Now you will have a painting that you really want to look at!