Palettes, Palettes, and More Palettes…
Paint palettes are like rabbits. They just keep multiplying! Back in early August I decided to give painting with watercolor a try. In an effort to avoid using paint I first tried watercolor pencils. They were interesting but they didn’t get me excited. Next I tried watercolor brush pens. Hmmm?? Also interesting but with my limited experience something still didn’t seem right. So I ordered a pre-filled, 12-pan, small metal palette made by Field Artist that came with two little brushes. I was hooked!
Then, before I knew it, I had ordered the Portable Painter palette with 12 empty half pans (palette #2) and another small double brush. With empty pans you have to buy tubes of paint to fill them. Twelve tubes, obviously, to get twelve different paints and fill all the pans in my new palette. I contacted a good friend who is an incredible watercolor artist to get her recommendations and I ordered them immediately.
Later in the fall, I took an urban sketching workshop and the instructor recommended we bring a palette with specific colors. I had most but was missing a few so I ordered them. I decided I needed a new palette with the colors recommended but thought it would be fun to make my own as I’d seen others do in YouTube videos. One used bottle caps as paint “pans.” I started collecting diet tonic caps and found a nice tin that some techie tool came in to use as my palette container.
Nine bottle caps fit perfectly in the tin! I bought some magnetic tape and put a short strip on each bottle cap. Next I filled the caps with the recommended paints and added some more to fill all my caps (palette #3). This was very cool and I was impressed. I took all three of my palettes with me to the workshop but my DIY palette was all I used.
While attending the 2-day workshop with eleven other urban sketchers, I learned more about selecting one’s palette. What I learned was that though some artists carry a palette with a limited selection of paints others carry palettes with 12, 24, even 36 different paints! Beyond three warm primary colors and three cool primary colors the additional paints are called “convenience” colors. That is, though one can, theoretically, mix all colors from the three primary colors of yellow, red, and blue, having the other desired colors at the ready with no mixing is, you guessed it, “convenient.” Another slant on palette choice is that some artists have different palette paint selections depending on the season of the year or the location in which they will be painting.
I also saw up close the Pocket Palette from Expeditionary Arts, a business card sized palette, that a fellow participant had. Naturally, after seeing it and now having a justification - kind of - for having multiple palettes, I ordered one when I got home (palette #4). This small palette with its different sized magnetic pans is incredible. It is so small yet versatile with so many ways to configure the pans depending on how many paint colors you feel you need to have with you. Now deep into this whole watercolor “thing,” I’ve decided to use only Daniel Smith artist quality paints and for my Pocket Palette I decided to load it with the fourteen colors Australian artist and color guru Jane Blundell suggests for her “Ultimate Color Mixing Set.”
But wait, there’s more! When I decided to start offering my Sketching & Painting Sampler sessions and provide participants with a sketching and painting kit, I had to select paints for the palette included in the kit. Thus was born my ‘Sampler” palette with five paints (palette #5). For this palette I chose three primary color paints (Gamboge Hue, Cadmium Red, and Cobalt Blue, all “warm” primaries) and two “convenience” paints, Burnt Sienna and Hooker’s Green Dark. This collection will give my students a good base to begin learning about color mixing. For these palettes I chose to use Winsor & Newton Cotman (student grade) paints.
So from July to November I went from no watercolor palette to a total of five. And the year’s not over yet!
