March Madness Week 3 Update!

Last week, we finished narrowing down 50 paints to 25. This week, we had two jobs: we did a sort of mini-round to get us down to a final 16. We then narrowed it down to the Elite 8! Because so much happened, I won’t take you through every battle. Instead, let’s talk about the top 8 winners.

Elite 8

• Ultramarine Blue (PB29)
• Indanthrone Blue (PB60)
• Naples Yellow Deep (PBr24)
• Copper Azo Green (PY129)
• Transparent Pyrrol Orange (PO71 or DPP)
• Phthalo Green BS (PG7)
• Quinacridone Red/Coral (PR209)
• Indian Red (PR101)

It’s becoming very clear that this is not a good method of choosing a palette, if we had any thought of doing that. The bracket structure prevents us from ranking colors properly, or choosing them in relation to each other.

• In the first round, we were choosing between pretty similar colors, but in the second and third rounds, we were sometimes deciding between colors that have very different roles, such as Indanthrone Blue vs Quinacridone Rose.
• Colors we love, as a collective, got bumped because they were paired with juggernauts. The Discord loves Cobalt Turquoise, but it was bumped in round 2 when it got pit against unstoppable Ultramarine Blue.
• Colors we’re apathetic about squeaked by due to low competition. Nobody seems super psyched about Indian Red, but it only had to beat Venetian Red, Raw Umber, and Titanium White to get to the Elite 8.
• Sometimes a slot ends up getting omitted even though there are competitors if they end up not being in the same competition. Azo Yellow and Hansa Yellow Medium were both in the top 16, but not against each other, and both were voted down compared to quirkier competition PY129 and PBr24.
• By the same token, sometimes weirdly similar colors end up both getting through because they happen to be in different competitions, such as Indanthrone Blue and Ultramarine Blue, which I typically would think of as sharing the same violet-blue slot. If I were making a limited 8 color palette, I would not put the both of them on.
• In a real-world palette choosing scenario, you might make adjustments such as “I have too many transparent colors so I’ll add more granulating ones” or “I’ll switch to a different shade to cover more of the spectrum from my other colors.” For example, once you locked in having Ultramarine, you could say, “I need a cyan for my other blue.” But we had already bumped Phthalo Turquoise in a competition with Ultramarine!

It’s possible that I could have circumvented some of this by a more top-down bracket structure: for example, making sure that each “arm” would result in a single color category. Still, any reorganization of the colors would result in different trade-offs. I think inherently, the bracket is not a good way to choose a usable palette.

However! I welcome anyone who looks at this elite 8 and says “Challenge Accepted.”

The bracket continues! After 4 more competitions, we will have a top 4, a top 2, and then one of these lucky pigments will be crowned Idyll Sketching’s Top Pigment of 2026.