At the beginning of this year I had some palette choices to make. Whether to keep Opera Pink on my palette was one of those choices.
If you look at my journals and out of journal paintings you’ll see that I kept testing Opera Pink.
It wasn’t a color that I actively sought out. It came in a palette of Schmincke colors I purchased just so I could get the palette box!
For a long time I didn’t even put it in the box to use. Then I had a stretch of painting caucasian skin and I couldn’t seem to get the vibrancy I wanted from my other reds and pinks so I popped it in my palette box.
I’d have to say it’s seductive, if you like pops of bright color.
And let me also say, if you’re interested in lightfastness you do not want to use Opera pink. But I was interested in the joy of getting colors down on the page and I accustomed to digital scans capturing the “fresh” art before the fade.
For me the decision to keep it or not depended on what I could get from my other reds. I put together a palette of the red watercolors I typically used, and some that I had left behind for various reasons.
Why Would You Leave a Color Behind?
When we change one color in a palette we need to consider our complementary colors—are there any remaining that work with that new color? Do the new complementary pairs give us more or fewer options? What about the triads we’ve been using? How are the colors skewed from them with the new color we’ve added? Do we still have a triad? Do we have fewer options?
There is also the question of value. What is the darkest value we can attain with that new color? Is it similar to the one it’s removing. For instance if you took Perylene Green out of your palette and replaced it with any yellow, you’ve eliminated a pigment, the Perlyene Green, which you could have used to enrich and darken the values of your mixes—and the new yellow you’ve brought in, even at full saturation, will never attain as dark a value. Some of your dark value options are now gone. On the other side of things it might help to have a pigment of lighter value, depending on the work you do and the mixes you like.
My point is that when you bring in a new color it has a ripple effect across your palette box, and into your paintings. You want to be aware of this and test things out. And you want to revisit the relationships you already have in your palette box.
You can check relationships by making color swatch charts and comparing them to the swatches you made of your original colors.
I Like to Make Blob Tests
I fill a clean brush with one of the colors I’m going to test and make a blob of paint on the paper. I fill another clean brush with a color I’m testing and make a blob on the paper about 2 inches away from the first blob. Then I pull the wet washes together to see how they mix.
Here’s an example of some swatches. They don’t look organized perhaps, but they tell me what I need. In each mixture I can isolate various mixes I know I’ll love to use, just by varying the amount of each pigment in the mix.
Often with several similar pigments in a palette it can be difficult to decide which to keep if you’re looking to downsize your palette. Swatches like this help show color and value ranges that are possible, as well as granulation.
Pairings, like the example page shown here, allow me to reassess the red pigments I have in my palette. I love to paint chickens and I need a range of reds to do that. But how does each red interact with my blues, greens, and yellows. Which of those resultant mixes can’t I live without? In this way I narrow my selection by what it brings to the table and not just the lovely shock value of it as a standalone color.
Making a standard watercolor chart where your pigments are listed horizontally and vertically in the same order and you paint lines of those colors horizontally and vertically to look at the intersections for color mix results is another useful strategy to test colors mixing with others.
Then You Just Have to Paint
But as I was always reminding my students, ultimately you just have to paint. And that’s what I did at the beginning of this year—I painted caucasian skin that was flushed, freckled, or overheated.
Opera Pink didn’t pass the test—I pulled out all my sumptuous reds from Daniel Smith (a whole set of Quinacridones). Quin Pink is always on my palette—it’s my cool red. Quin Magenta is a longtime favorite I like to save a spot for.
In this battle for “pinks” I decided I’d much rather have Quin Coral than Opera Pink. Quin Coral is a subtler color with an orange cast that is useful not only for caucasian skin, it can bring warmth as a first glaze in many darker complexions. You’ll also find it essential if you go to the zoo and paint flamingos.
When you start painting you’re actually answering a new set of questions, on the go—how do I make this into a shade? How best do I neutralize this to make the form of my subject curve? How much range of value does this one pigment give me? What do I need to add to it to “bolster” it? Do I have a suitable pigment on my palette that can bolster it? Intensify it? Neutralize it? What complements and near complements to it do I have on my current palette? Does it create a useful triad with my current pigments?
Don’t forget to let your blob tests and you finished painting tests sit for a week or two before you make any judgements. You want to make the assessment with a fresh eye, not when you’re frustrated with working with a new pigment out of your comfort zone. And your eye needs to adjust—so the more tests you make the merrier.
Did It Go or Did It Stay?
Opera pink is not longer on my palette. I’m looking for a way to work Quin Coral onto my palette without loosing my other favorite reds. And Alizarin Crimson, from Grumbacher Finest reminded me how much I missed that fugitive color. (The permanent Alizarin Crimsons I tried from a variety of companies didn’t bring me joy during my tests.)
So the palette shifted and the painting continues.
Discovering new color combinations and harmonies is one of the great adventures in painting. If you take the colors you’re testing in actual paintings, you’ll quickly see which colors you favor.
Free your mind from thinking about making the perfect painting. Think instead about how the colors you’re testing do your bidding.
Don’t throw the “rejected” colors away. If you like them for certain applications, or in certain mixes, hang on to them and use them when you’re at home and the constraints of a palette box don’t apply.
Who knows, if you start testing another color in your palette, a blue for instance, it might mean that it’s time to bring that discarded color back because it works better with the new blue!
Have fun.
