What colors best matches red brick?
Painting is about trial and error. The best way to learn and
find your own identity in what you paint is to not search in the
answers of others but to ask yourself the questions. My advice to
you would be, first of all, to try around and find the joy in
it.
So only read the following if you disagree.
To answer your question: if you know how to make orange, all you
need to make a brick color is add a little cyan to desaturate it
and a little black to darken it, also make sure your orange is
closer to red than yellow. A good trick to try if you have any
experience with Photoshop and aim to produce a very precise color
is to just get an image of a brick from the internet, use the
eye-dropper to select it as the foreground color, then click on the
foreground color icon to open the color-mixer and check the CMYK.
CMYK being Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black wich is the subtractive
process of obtaining color (subtractive because it removes light as
you add pigment, the light process is additive because if you mix
all color wavelengths you get white - just a little trivia if your
interested). You can then divide the CMYK percentages into portions
of paint.
Example: I got the following results from an image i downloaded
from google search:
C:22 M:87 Y:81 K:12 (pretty much the relative amounts i
initially gave you. The percentage here is calculated separately
for each color)
Simply round the numbers to C20 M90 Y80 and K10 and translate
them to drips of paint, mixing 2 drips of cyan with 9 of Magenta, 8
of Yellow and 1 of Black. Note that if the combined percentages are
below 100% you'll have to add the difference with white.
Be sure to get primary colors for this, it's not just any
pigments. Be particularly suspicious of most yellows that are sold
as primary (many of them contain white and will ruin the saturation
of your colors), a medium cadmium should be ideal for making
orange. Magenta is also very tricky, a difference in hues here and
you'll end up with brown instead of orange. Best way to picture the
exact hue is to ask for a violet and a red and then decide wich of
the shades of magenta being sold is less blue and less pink and
most distinct from the two other paints. Cyan again can suffer from
the same problem as yellow or contain small amounts of red, try
something a lit lighter than cerulean without being less vivid -
think of a summer sky.
Of course all this is very subjective, what i picture to be
brick color in my mind could be very different from what you
imagine. Also there isn't really a brick color, since brick is
essentialy a texture with different hues. But try around and you
should come up with something you're happy with. Experimenting is
half the fun in painting.