Green Gamut, and Spring Palette ideas

 

With the Spring weather hopefully just around the corner, it was time to think about setting up my new palette that I bought from Avenue des Arts. It is made by Holbein, it has spots for 24 paints, and it has two round wells for mixing washes. One change this year I wanted to have an area just for making greens, which is the way I used to have my palette set up. This way it can get green and messy and not affect other colours. In this painting I tested out a bunch of colours that would define a green gamut, that is, a boundary in which most greens can be created. There is also grey ochre in the painting, which can be used to create dark value or pastel greens.

5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, March 2021

Here is a look at my plan sketched out,  the top row starts with 7 earth colours, then 9 synthetic high chroma colours. The bottom row has the green gamut along with the two high chroma blues I used for painting the sky. Off to the right is carbon black which tends to get messy so has its own area. Not shown  in the sketch, there are three large square mixing areas under the top row, two under the bottom row, and an extendable fold off to the the right. The two circles represent the shallow mixing wells, hopefully in makes doing blue skies easier since I wanted to do larger paintings this summer. When I actually squeeze the paint in the palette I'll take a picture and make another blog.

 

top row: 

earths: yellow ochre, raw sienna, umber, raw umber, burnt sienna, venetian red, grey ochre

synthetics: perylene maroon, quin purple, quin violet, quin magenta, pyrol red, pyrol orange-red, orange, yellow-orange, yellow. 

bottom row

green gamut: phthalo yellow-green, lemon yellow, orange, perylene black-green, phthalo blue-green, indo blue, 

Sky blues: phthalo blue, phthalo cyan-blue. 

carbon lamp black