My Two-Step Approach to Watercolour Palette Building

Almost immediately after discovering the wonderful hobby that is painting, I also discovered the secondary, and even more addictive, hobby that is palette design. At first, I saw this mostly as a question of hues, by which I mean both the hue a paint has in itself, and the hues it will allow me to mix.

(Some paints are better mixers than others: for example, PR206, a colour I used to love, is a great neutralizer for many blues/greens that yields many dark neutrals. Because, yes, the ability to get dark values has always been important to me, too.)

However, over time, I became aware that other factors are just as important, and I ended up deciding on a desirable palette features much like the ones proposed by Handprint. I have already touched on them here, but they are:

• the range of high-chroma hues available (after mixing)
• the availability of dark values
• mixing convenience
• “other pigment properties” such as staining/liftability, granulation/smoothness, and transparency/opacity.

The last one is a particular obsession of mine right now.

Incidentally, as the reference to Handprint proves, I do not think I am making any huge and original discovery here. I think most active painters are, at least subconsciously, aware of all these palette-planning features. And, actually, an additional catalyst for this post was reading about Jean Dobie’s palette. Logan has posted (or, more accurately, ranted) about it here, and I fully agree with his take, but one aspect of how she presented her paints that really spoke to me was the idea of having some basic colours that see a lot of use, and then some specialty colours to be used as circumstances dictate.

She divides her “specialty groups” into staining, opaque, and tertiary (a very confusing term, as Logan points out), with her basic colours being transparent, non-staining, and, um, not lightfast, since they include rose madder and genuine aureoline (as well as the lightfast and granulating cobalt blue and viridian).

My own basics would also be transparent–well, as transparent as I can get them–but also definitely lightfast, and more on the staining side. The latter is important for layering, because I do not have a very light touch. (And I want to be more deliberate about this! In the excitement of painting, I sometimes forget to leave a “lifty” paint layer alone.)

[I plan to include a picture here when I have access to my paints again–I am in transit–but my favourite bases include:

• Yellows: PY151, or a split pair of PY175 and PY154. (I tend to dismiss PY150 as too earthy.)
• Oranges: the old transparent red-orange PO73 was amazing. I am still looking for a replacement.
• Reds: PV19, or a split of PR209 and PR122
• Blue-violet: PB15 red shade or a fine-grained ultramarine. (PB60 is not bright enough to count here. I see it more as a convenience dark.)
• Cyan: PB15 green shade, PB16, and Aqua from Winsor Newton.
• Green: the green phthalos, of course.]

I generally pick a subset of such “base colours” that will let me mix any high-chroma hue I need. And then I add the specialty colours, which tend to include several highly granulating paints for texture (“to take the focus away from my linework”, as I ofem say), with a few opaques in case I want highlights, or just a heavier look. I tend to shy away from convenience darks (my “palette dirt” is a good dark base and harmonizes with the painting better) and I have almost given up on smooth earth colours as they are so mixable, but I do sometimes include some paints to make greens easier to mix.

And Now, a Painting

I wanted to include a recent painting to show that I do still paint. And, I suppose, to show that I really use opaques and granulators.