Trying to Nail That ‘Rachel Blue’
So, I got this idea stuck in my head about a specific color, this ‘rachel blue’. Saw it somewhere, can’t quite recall where, maybe an old photo or something online. Point is, I couldn’t just buy it off the shelf. Looked around, no dice. Figured, alright, I’ll mix it myself. How hard could it be, right?
First things first, needed supplies. Went down to the local craft shop. Didn’t need anything fancy, just basic stuff. Here’s what I grabbed:
- Some tubes of acrylic paint: a decent primary blue, titanium white, a basic green, and maybe a small black just in case.
- A palette knife for mixing.
- A cheap plastic palette with wells.
- A couple of small canvases to test the colors.
Back home, I cleared off a space on my workbench. Squeezed out some blue, added a bit of white. Stirred it up. Looked okay, but way too pale, like sky blue. Not the ‘rachel blue’ I remembered. That one had more… punch, more depth.
Okay, attempt two. More blue this time, less white. Better, getting warmer, but still flat. It lacked that certain something. I thought maybe a tiny, tiny drop of black would give it that depth. Bad idea. Immediately turned muddy, kinda greyish. Nope. Scraped that off the palette fast.
Cleaned the knife, started fresh. What else gives blue depth? I remembered some blues lean slightly towards green, giving them a richer feel. Decided to try adding just a speck of the green paint to the blue-white mixture. Okay, now we were getting somewhere! It shifted the hue in an interesting way. It wasn’t ‘rachel blue’ yet, but it felt closer than anything before.
Spent the next hour or so just tweaking the ratios. More blue, tiny bit of white, fraction of green. Then maybe a bit more white? Then back to adding a touch more blue. It was a real back-and-forth. Got paint on my fingers, on the table… standard procedure, really. Kept dabbing samples onto a piece of paper, letting them dry a bit to see the real color.
Finally, one mix just clicked. It looked right. It had that vibrancy but also that subtle depth I was chasing. Quickly tried to remember the ratio – mostly blue, a decent splash of white, and honestly, just the smallest hint of green. Like, really small. Wrote down my guess immediately: maybe 5 parts blue, 1 part white, tiny dot of green? Something like that.
Mixed up a slightly larger batch based on that guess. Tested it on a small canvas patch and let it dry fully. Stood back and looked at it. Yeah, that was it. Or at least, close enough for me. It felt like the ‘rachel blue’ I had in my mind.
Felt pretty satisfied, honestly. Took a while, made a bit of a mess, but I got the color I wanted. It’s not like it came out of a factory tube, perfect and consistent, but it was my version. Learned you just gotta keep fiddling sometimes, and don’t be afraid to add a weird color into the mix. You never know.
