New Color Swatch

New Color Swatch

I made another swatch for my new set of colors. This one came out much better than the first one I did, the values are more even and I did all my mixing on my palette (except for a few corrections here and there where I felt that my mix was too close to one of the colors). I also only did a triangle this time except for the full square.

Here are the colors I found most interesting:

  • I didn't expect hansa yellow light and phthalo blue to mix such a clear green. I hope I get a chance to use this color soon, I'll be on the lookout for things that I could paint with it.
  • It's cool to see how cerulean blue separates out again after drying. Maybe this is due to the sedimentary nature of this paint, I'm not sure. I'm reading Jan Hart's Watercolor Artist's Guide to Exceptional Color at the moment which goes into some detail on this stuff but I'm not at a point yet where I want to really dive into the depths of paint and pigment properties.
  • Like with my last swatch, I'm surprised at how interestingly winsor violet mixes with other colors. It's such a potent color but it looses its violetness very quickly when mixed.
  • It's wild how a color as dark as raw umber just completely dissolves into gray as soon as it touches a blue. The exception on my swatch is the raw umber/phthalo blue mix which is this really interesting dark turquoise that I also hope to be able to use soon. Maybe I could use this to draw water.
  • I didn't realise that yellow ochre would create some nice greens when mixed with blue paints, for some reason I was putting it in the same category as burnt sienna and raw umber and expected it to mix to gray too.

Overall, I'm happy with the balance of greens, oranges, grays and purples that I can create with my new palette. I want to get more familiar with the 12 paints so I started a new practice of picking two color pairs a day and just playing around with them on some cheap paper to get a feel for how they combine. I'll blog about that once I'm a little further along.

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