Jane Blundell is an Australian artist whose website contains a huge wealth of information about color, pigment, and palette-building, included swatches from hundreds of paints. Her website was the first place I learned about pigments and I’ve been hugely influenced by her palette choices. So what’s in her palette?
Jane Blundell’s Ultimate Mixing Palette
Jane Blundell has put a lot of thought into suggesting a palette for beginner painters. She has picked out 15 colors, all from Daniel Smith (she is a Daniel Smith Brand Ambassador, so of course).
I assigned each to a color slot; click on the slot name to see my list of alternative colors for this slot. Click on the color name to see my Color Spotlight for that color.
Blundell takes pride in having designed a palette that has a lot of possibilities for conveniently mixing a wide variety of colors using only two palette colors. For example, a wide variety of greens can be mixed using the Ultramarine, Cerulean, Phthalo Blues or Phthalo Green plus the yellow or gold. There is no superfluous addition of pre-mixed colors as in many beginner-oriented palettes (with the exception of Jane’s Grey, which was added after DS made that paint in her honor; previously she recommended self-mixing the Ultramarine and Burnt Sienna.)
Blundell has released an ebook showing off various mixes that can be made with the palette. (I bought the ebook but I don’t think I learned as much from studying it as I did by mixing colors myself. Some things you need to do on your own.)
The colors in the palette, taken as a group, cover a wide variety of hues, chromas, values range, opacity, and textures (e.g. granulating to not). It’s a palette the offers a solid introduction to all that watercolor has to offer.
With that said, I think I was overly guided by it when I began collecting paints, because the way Jane Blundell talks about it makes it seem like Building Your Palette is Now A Solved Problem, but actually (like all palettes) it is guided by the maker’s personal aesthetic preferences which differ in some ways from my own.
Jane Blundell’s Actual Palette
In Jane Blundell’s post Building Your Palette of Colors, she shows her own palette (at least as of the last update in May 2019), which is quite similar to the Ultimate Mixing Palette with a few tweaks and add-ons. What’s most interesting to me is the way it’s laid out. She has her twenty core colors laid out in a grid with the columns being basic color families (yellows, reds, blues, greens, neutrals), and the rows being color themes (cool, warm, earth, and dark). She also has four “extras” that don’t fit the theme.
| Theme | Yellow | Red | Blue | Green | Neutral |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cool | Hansa Yellow Medium | Quinacridone Rose | Phthalo Blue RS | Phthalo Green BS | Buff Titanium |
| Warm | Quinacridone Gold | Transparent Pyrrol Orange | Ultramarine | Undersea Green | Burnt Sienna |
| Earth | Goethite | Indian Red | Cerulean Blue Chromium | Sap Green | Burnt Umber |
| Dark | Raw Umber | Pyrrol Crimson | Indanthrone Blue | Perylene Green | Jane’s Gray |
Extras: Rich Green Gold, Cobalt Turquoise, Transparent Red Oxide, Moonglow
This is 24-color set is a superset of the 15-color Ultimate Mixing Palette, with two minor swaps:
- Phthalo Blue Green Shade is replaced with Red Shade
- Pyrrol Scarlet is replaced with Transparent Pyrrol Orange. (The blog post confusingly lists this as ‘Transparent Pyrrol Orange (PO73)’, so it’s unclear if it’s means Transparent Pyrrol Orange (PO71) or Pyrrol Orange (PO73). I assumed PO71 because it appears to be the older, redder form of PO71 that DS used to release. It has since been replaced with a more middle orange hue which is no longer a complement of Phthalo Blue RS, so I’m not sure if she still uses it.)
I think this is an absolutely fascinating way to lay out a palette, making use of two dimensions like a graph with the X axis for hue and the Y axis for color properties. It’s interesting to think of yourself as needing a cool, warm, earth, and dark version of each of your major color categories; certainly as a primary color enthusiast I like the idea of doing this for my reds, yellows, and blues, though I would probably not try to force myself to have so many greens. I think this layout is also interesting because it naturally suggests where your palette gaps are, depending on the values you decided on by choosing the axes. If I lay my colors out in this grid and I’m missing a ‘dark red’ or an ‘earth blue’, I know what to add.
I do think there is some weird fudging here (is Raw Umber really a yellow? is Burnt Sienna really a neutral? is orange red?) but that merely proves that you can be flexible and not take your system too seriously.
I like this system so much that I permanently adopted a version of it for the way I lay out my palettes!
How I adapted this system
NOTE: This section has been added in January 2025 to reflect on the lasting impact this palette organization system has had on me.
You may notice that in most of my palette maps, I arrange my hues horizontally on the X axis in each row: from yellow to red to blue to green (though not necessarily with exactly one element in each “slot”: I often have multiple yellows, for example, or fill in intermediate colors such as orange). I also tend to group colors in rows themed around a hue property. While I don’t split out a “cool” and a “warm” row (because I don’t believe in the cool-warm dichotomy), I do tend to have a “bright”, “dark”, and “earth/granulating” row.
Here’s a visual “template” of the way I lay out my Folio Palette in this spirit. The Folio Palette fits 3 rows of 10 standard pans.
| Theme | Yellow | Orange | Scarlet | Red | Pink | Violet | Blue | Cyan | Green | Neutral |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bright | ||||||||||
| Dark | ||||||||||
| Earth |
I’ve even figured out ways to adapt it for a 14-color Pocket Palette, which fits two rows of 7 standard pans.
| Theme | Yellow | Orange | Red | Pink | Blue | Cyan | Green |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bright | |||||||
| Dark or Earth |
I don’t necessarily put everything exactly in the right place or have a color for every slot – I’ll jostle things around. In the lower rows of the Folio Palette, I skip entire sections by putting in mixing wells. I also tend to take over the orange, violet, green, and even neutral sections for more primary shades. The important thing isn’t to maintain the integrity of the grid (e.g. by having a bright yellow over a dark/earth yellow), but to divide things into theme rows and, within that, put them in hue order.
I still credit Jane Blundell for giving me the idea to think about colors in this way, even though I have adapted it pretty far from her original layout.