What Type of Palette Do You Use?
For watercolor I use a Cheap Joe's Piggyback Palette.
The Paint Colors/Brands I Use
I use Winsor & Newton Artist Watercolor paints. Along the short side of my palette I have:
Reds: Scarlet Lake, Cadmium Red, Rose Dore, Alizarin Crimson, Permanent Rose, Cobalt Violet
Earth tones/Neutrals: Davy's Gray (May change to "Neutral Tint" shortly), Burnt Umber, Raw Umber, Burnt Sienna, Gold Ochre, Yellow Ochre
Along the long sides of the palette:
Yellows: Naples Yellow, Lemon Yellow, Lemon Yellow Deep, Cadmium Lemon, Aureolin, New Gamboge, Cadmium Yellow Pale, Cadmium Yellow, Cadmium Orange
Blues: Ultramarine Violet, Winsor Violet, French Ultramarine, Cobalt, Prussian, Cerulean, Manganese, Indigo, Ivory Black
Why I Use These Colors
I also have 15 different colors of green in the "piggyback". (Why are they 'hidden' there? Because the teachers don't seem to like me to use premixed green colors -- and they can't see them there!)
I have these colors because they were required by different teachers I've had over the years, or they were ones I particularly liked, Or the yellows and blues mixed beautiful greens. I do mostly plein air landscapes, so I like greens...
For oil painting I use a rectangular glass palette. I layout the colors around the far three sides of the palette in the following order: Lemon Yellow, Cadmium Yellow, Sap Green, Olive Green, Titanium White (in the corner); Cerulean Blue, Ultramarine Blue; Dioxizine Purple, Alizarin Crimson, Cadmium Red, more Titanium White (corner); Yellow Ochre, Burnt Sienna, Raw Umber.
I'll be taking a plein air oil class this summer and the teacher will only let us use six colors, plus white. He's going to show us how to mix all the colors we need along with how to make proper shadow colors for distance, medium ground and foreground in our paintings. I don't know if I'll have time to paint -- I think I'll be taking too many notes! His colors are: Lemon Yellow/Cadmium Yellow, Permanent Rose/Permanent Carmine, Winsor Blue/Prussian Blue, Titanium White. He is a great teacher and I'm looking forward to learning a lot!
Tips and Tricks
- If you lay your colors out in the same order each time, then you know exactly what color you are reaching for each time. Sometimes I smear a bit of color out to make each color even more apparent as sometimes they look different en mass.
