Acrylic color question

[Bushbaby]

Hi!

I am looking to buy a light brown acrylic color. The problem is I can not make sense of the color names like burnt umber, raw umber, sienna and the likes. Could anyone advice me?

[Mindenbrush]

"Burnt" will always be dark and "Raw" will be light.

Depending on what you want the "brown" for?

I would suggest having a look in Loki`s Vallejo Paint Chart and then his Vallejo triads.

http://napoleonicwargamingadventures.blogspot.ca/p/vallejo-triad-charts.html

[PhilB]

Mindenbrush has good advice. That's a useful chart.

However, craft paint is so cheap that you can't go wrong with just grabbing a bunch and testing it. That's what I did.
I've been using a mixture of burnt umber, brown, ochre, black and white, in varying degrees, to give me many different shades of wood color and other natural shades.

Burnt umber on its own is kind of a dark brown with reddish undertones. The draft paint I bought labeled simply "brown" is a kind of light to medium brown which mixes well with either black or white to give good alternate shades.

Plus, I've been discovering the delights of partial mixing. I'll use a big brush to put various blobs of paint on my palette, then mix them in varying strengths to give multiple shades in a single pass. I never used to do that - I was stuck on the Foundry layer method and their three-tone paint collection.

Are you French? I got my craft paint at Cultura. They are a mine for scratchbuilding and painting supplies.

[SteveBurt]

If you want light brown, Raw Siena is the closest of the 'classic' artists colours, but it's not very light - more like a deep tan colour. Burnt Siena is red/brown and the Umbers are dark brown (Burnt a richer, redder colour) Something like Liquitex Bronze Yellow is good if you want a more sandy colour. Many websites which sell artists' colours have a colour swatch beside each one so you can see what it looks like.

[Bushbaby]

Thank you for all advice!

I think I will mix my own light brown using the darker brown colors I have at home!