Palette Talk

Color, Color, Everywhere!

Our old garden, en  Brionnais, with a double rainbow

 Students are always asking me about my palette. It is largely unconventional, and doesn't contain cadmium colors, or phthalo colors. It certainly contains more colors than any self-respecting plein air painter would ever allow anywhere near her own palette.
In practice, I never have all these colors on my own, but I always have them near at hand. I've discovered that I'd rather be painting than be spending inordinate amounts of time taming shouting cadmium colors, or trying to get phthalo blue to behave. But that's just my choice. You may well enjoy trying to find a correspondence between Mother Nature and that electric cadmium orange in your paintbox. 

I don't.


Here's a link from a blog post (diatribe) last year on this subject. http://donaldjurney.blogspot.com/2012/03/landscape-911_26.html

The colors marked with an # are the basic colors I usually have on the palette. Those marked ### are colors that I require my students to have.

Palette (from left to right):

Old Holland Ivory Black Extra 074 #

Old Holland Mixed White No. 2 (A5) #

Maimeri Classico Brilliant Yellow Deep 076

Maimeri Puro Naples Yellow Reddish 106

Becker Naples Yellow Deep (605) (or the Remb. mixture below #)

Rembrandt Trans. Yellow Oxide 265

Blockx Pyrrolo Vermillion #

Winsor Newton Yellow Ochre 744 #

Rembrandt Brownish-Madder 324 ###

Rembrandt Burnt Umber 409 #

Rembrandt Ultramarine Deep 506 #

Winsor Newton Alizarin Crimson Perm. 004 #

Winsor Newton Cerulean Blue 137 #

Old Holland Ultramarine Violet B199

Old Holland Violet Gray 208

Blockx Mixed Green Light 463

Holbein Compose Green H284#

Holbein Green Gray H372#

Rembrandt Cinnabar Green Green Light 626 #

Old Holland Cadmium Green Light D44 #

Rembrandt Sap Green 623 #

Winsor Newton Prussian Green 540 ###

For tinting canvases, I use Old Holland transparent red oxide or Blockx Capucine yellow light (426)

Sometimes I don't tint. I also have used yellow ochre, transparent yellow oxide, and a mixture of ultramarine and black, as in this blog post (9 December 2012).

On the palette found on the workshop website, you'll see

Rembrandt Naples Yellow Deep (223) and Rembrandt Yellow Ochre

Light (228). Mixing these two, one can approximate the hard-to-get "Secret Yellow" (Becker 605 Naples Yellow deep)