If you’re curious about making your own polymer clay color palettes, check out this guide!
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There are so many ready-mixed colors available in craft stores. You may be wondering why you should go to the effort of mixing your own colors and creating your own clay color palettes.
Well, there are several reasons!
First, you might be working on a project and want colors that “match” in a way you just can’t find in the pre-made colors.
Or you might want to mix up some proprietary colors for the clay creations that you sell. Doing this makes your products that much more unique, and harder for other makers to duplicate.
Finally, you might love working with clay and be looking for a complimentary side hustle. Did you know that there are tons of sellers selling clay color recipes on Etsy? Check it out! If you can make beautiful, cohesive color palettes, you could bring in some extra cash with them!
Convinced? Great! Then let’s talk about the basics of color theory!
Let’s take a little trip back to elementary school, why don’t we?
Back in the good old days of fingerpainting and naptimes, we learned about primary and secondary colors. The primary colors—red, blue, and yellow—can be mixed to make the secondary colors—purple, orange, and green. (And if we mix them all, we get brown or black depending on the amounts we use!)
A quick refresher:
- Red & blue = purple
- Red & yellow = orange
- Yellow & blue = green
- Red, yellow & blue = brown, or black
We can also add black and white to the mix to get:
- Red & white = pink
- Black & white = grey
It’s also pretty common knowledge that black will darken colors whereas white will lighten them.
By combining various primary colors, secondary colors, and blacks and whites, you can create just about any color you could imagine.
Coloring mixing is an art form and it takes practice, but it’s worth it!
In Short: If you’re just getting started with clay, or you only want to buy a few packages, start with red, blue, yellow, black and white. From there you can mix any color you might need!
Okay, I’m on board with mixing my own clay color palettes. But will I be able to re-create them later?
Yes—if you keep track of the steps you take to get your new colors! Color mixing is just like cooking and baking. Experiment and come up with new colors, but take notes to create recipes that you can easily re-create. You can also share these recipes with your friends and followers or sell them on Etsy.
I’m going to illustrate the process of creating these color recipes on a recipe card that I’ve created. And you’re in luck—I want to share that recipe card PDF with you for free. You don’t even have to join my mailing list (although hey, I’d love to have you on the list!). Just click the button below to go to the file. Please keep in mind that this file is for personal use only; do not re-distribute or sell it. Thanks!
How should I record my color recipes?
As mentioned above, if you’re creating colors with the intention of using them again later, you need to keep track of what you’ve created so that you can remake them whenever you want.
This is the color recipe card that I’m using. If you didn’t see the link above, you can download it here.
There are several circles near the top of the card. This is how you’ll track the colors and the amounts of each color that you use to create your final color. The bigger circle at the end is for the final color. You can fill these in with pencil crayons, but I’d recommend gluing baked clay onto the page so you can see the actual finished colors at a glance.
Here is an example of a completed recipe card.
How do you measure out the clay?
When I’m making my recipes, I like to use small amounts of clay to minimize waste. I’m not going to mix two or three new blocks together and hope for the best. I make my new color in a small amount, recording the process as I go, and then I can make a larger quantity of it later if needed.
I take the colors I’m going to use, condition them, and roll them out to the third thinnest setting on my clay roller. (If you don’t have a clay roller, check this one out!) Then I use a small circle cutter (the size doesn’t matter, as long as you use the same one for all the different colors you’ll be mixing) and make circles. These circles form the base of my recipe. If you don’t have any of these little circle cutters, I’d definitely recommend getting some! Check out this set on Amazon!
I’m making a pretty, soft orange. To do so, I’m using:
- 2 Circles White
- 2 Circles Red
- 4.5 Circles Yellow
Another way you might see this is two parts white, two parts red, and four and a half parts yellow.
Now this isn’t enough clay to really make anything. Eventually, I’ll need a much larger quantity of this particular color. Let’s get into how to make more of it.
How do I make more of a color than what my recipe says?
Some people might say this is common-sense math, and maybe it is, but I’m awful at math. So I’m going to take this nice and slow, just in case you are also not mathematically inclined.
We can make more in one of two ways. The proportions will always stay the same, but the quantity of clay that makes up those proportions will change.
The first option – use a thicker amount of clay, and/or a larger circle cutter. The thickness of the clay and the size of the cutter don’t matter. All that matters is that you are consistent. If you’re going to roll the clay thicker, make sure you roll all the colors that you’re using to make your mix that same thickness. If you use a larger circle cutter, make sure you use that larger cutter on all the colors being mixed.
The second option – multiplication! If you don’t want to mess with the cutter size or thickness of your clay sheets because you worry you might make a mistake, you can use multiplication and just cut more circles.
Let’s go back to my orange color. This is the recipe I created:
- 2 Circles White
- 2 Circles Red
- 4.5 Circles Yellow
To make say, 5x the amount of clay, we’ll multiply all those quantities by 5.
- 2 Circles White x 5 = 10 Circles White
- 2 Circles Red x 5 = 10 Circles Red
- 4.5 Circles Yellow x 5 = 22.5 Circles Yellow
You can multiply this recipe by any amount. This method is great if you don’t need a lot. If you need to make a lot of a particular color, I’d go with the first method mentioned (large cutter, thicker sheets of clay).
How do I make cohesive clay color palettes?
One of the easiest ways to make your color palette cohesive is to add a small to medium amount of one of your palette colors to each of your other colors.
For example, suppose you create a stunning autumn palette with greens, yellows, oranges, and reds. It’s almost perfect, but something’s missing. Individually, each of the colors is great… but they don’t necessarily look like they belong together.
You can fix this by choosing one color in your palette and adding a little of it to the other colors.
For example, I have these five vaguely autumnal colors. These are not colors I mixed myself; they’re all straight from the package. I have an orange, a green, a brown, a red, and a yellow. Independently, they’re just fine, but I want them to look like they really belong to the same palette.
The color I’m going to mix in is orange. So, I’ve cut 3 circles of each of the colors I’m using (orange included) and then added an extra half of a circle of orange to each of the colors, including the orange, so I get the same amount of clay for each of the colors.
Then mix!
What you’ll have are five colors that are slightly closer together.
I only added half a circle of orange to each, so it wasn’t a significant shift. You can add as much of the tinting color as you want, just make sure you add the same amount to each of the colors in your palette.
Of course, this will change the colors you’ve created – so if you’re in love with the colors as they currently are, keeping the colors as is might be more important to you than cohesion.
A few more things to consider.
Other questions might arise when mixing clay. Here are a few and how I’d answer them!
What brand or type of clay should I use?
This will depend, to a degree, on what you’re making with the clay. That said, my go-to is Sculpey Premo. (Check out this multi-pack!) I didn’t like working with Sculpey III. I prefer Sculpey over Fimo, although I did start with Fimo and there wasn’t anything wrong with it. I do not like Michael’s brand of clay, Craft Smart. In my experience, it was way too soft… to the point where it was unworkable.
What is the easiest way to mix colors?
I prefer to use a clay rolling machine, like this. I just squish the colors together, put them through the machine, fold the slab in half, run it through the machine again… and I keep doing this until the colors are completely combined.
My clay is too hard, how can I soften it?
When my clay is too tough, I use Sculpey’s clay softener – which you can find here. And no, I’m not being paid by Sculpey to say this, because I know I promote them a lot here. I just prefer their product to the others that I’ve tried.
Is there anywhere I can get FREE color recipes online?
Of course! If you search for clay color recipes on Pinterest, you can find tons of free color recipes. I’ve also created a Pinterest board where I’ll be saving some of my favorites. You can check out the board here, and don’t forget to follow me on Pinterest!
Do you make your own clay color palettes?
When I started working with polymer clay, I relied entirely on the available stock colors at Michaels. It was only once I started experimenting with mixing colors that I truly started to feel like a clay artist. How about you? Do you make your own clay color palettes?
If you have any tips or tricks or think I missed anything, let us know in the comments below!
For more fun projects, check out my list of free patterns and resources here. If you’re looking specifically for clay projects, click here.
Happy making!
