I have a lot of half-used paint
tubes in my studio, but some years ago, when I started teaching, I limited my
palette to 6 primary colors and burnt sienna (and large tube of titanium white,
of course.) Why?
Well, a primary reason is that
paints are expensive, and a certain percentage of my students were approaching
painting for the first time. I didn’t want their first venture to be ugly
because of the cost.
In addition, I had just read Blue and
Yellow Don’t Make Green by Michael Wilcox.
If you limit your paints to one
each of red, yellow and blue, this limited palette may disappoint you. In
theory, the “primary” colors should easily make all the colors on the palette
by mixing. But commercial paints aren’t exact
primary colors. Looking at the exercise shown at the right, notice that the purple and the green (secondary colors) aren't very bright. You will get better results if you have two of each primary
color.
The basic theory is that the color
wheel as a whole has a warm and a cool side and each color has an inclination to
be warm or cool. For instance, lemon yellow is cooler than cadmium yellow.
Since I need to replenish my oil
paints in my personal kit anyway, I began looking at my choices to see if I
could identify a more optimum selection of colors than I had been using.
The palette I had been using
included: zinc yellow, cadmium yellow, cadmium red, alizarin crimson permanent,
ultramarine blue, Phthalocyanine (Thalo) blue, and burnt sienna. Zinc yellow,
while it is a very cool yellow, I found to be a very weak color, easily
overpowered in mixing with any other color. The cadmiums are getting outrageously expensive. Thalo blue (or
Prussian, which is essentially the same) is a very strong and staining color
and easily overpowers other colors on mixing. But I haven’t found a good substitute
for Thalo or Prussian yet.
I am changing my basic palette to: Hanza
yellow light, Hanza yellow medium, Napthol red, Quinacridone red, ultramarine
blue, and either Prussian or Thalo blue (because I can’t find a good substitute
for this color.)Hanza is a substitute for Cadmium yellow. Cadmiums are opaque.
Hanza has some translucency and is said to mix well to form secondary colors
and tints. Burnt Sienna stays on the
palette because it’s essentially a shade of orange, but darker, so it’s easy to
mix it with ultramarine blue to make a rich dark.
I did some comparison because I’ve
been trying to get alizarin off the palette for many years without success. I
learned long ago that alizarin is a “fugitive” color. (That means that it tends
to fade.) On the other hand, it’s a very transparent color and is good for
glazing. It also mixes well with thalo green to create a rich black. However,
some years ago, manufacturers came out with Permanent Alizarin Crimson and I
thought they had it handled. But NoooOOOooo. The result was sort of dull and
dirty. I wasn’t happy but I didn’t think that I had a choice. Recently, a
representative from Golden Acrylics mentioned that Quinacridone Red (in
acrylics) is a good substitute for alizarin. Well, I’m switching to Quinacridone
Red in both my oil and acrylics palettes.
I did a little experiment (shown at left) to determine the differences between some of the reds in my oil kit. I
suggest that you try such comparisons at home. And if you can pick up old tubes
of paint rather than buying every color off the shelf, you’ll find that oil
lasts quite long in the tube. (Acrylics last somewhat less long, but their
shelf life seems to be improving.
Now, to come back to the question:
why do I recommend a 6-color palette? Well, I know of one artist who says he puts
every color in his kit on the palette every time he paints. He says he uses 72 colors.That’s a lot of
preparation. In addition, it uses up a lot of space on the palette that could
be used for blending. And, as you can mix any color with the right primaries,
putting more seems like overkill.
But some people just like to buy
paint, and if that’s you, why go ahead. You’re obviously not alone.
Manufacturers keep putting out new colors.
