A palette, firstly, is a physical thing, it holds the paint and provides the mixing areas you use to load up a brush. The word palette also refers to the colours that are chosen by the artist. I often talk about colour choice, once I showed a picture of my small landscape palette that I still use. With so many new paints I bought, it was time for a larger palette, the one in the picture above was from Avenue des Arts, it is the Holbein folding plastic palette 1024-2000. It has 24 slots with 5 big mixing areas, 2 mixing wells, 1 little box area, a folding flap, and a thumb hole. This will make it easier to do bigger paintings on location and mix brighter colours. I wonder if the wind is going to blow the flap around though.
Here is is a schematic that I painted out in my sketchbook to better show the colours. Across the top the first 8 are all iron oxide earth colours ranging from yellow, brown, orange red and grey. The next 8 are high chroma yellows, oranges and reds. The bottom left are the magentas, blues and greens. Finally I used the little box area for two shades of sky blue. I will try it this way for awhile, the main change is the large number of earth colours and more middle colours than before (magenta, orange, cyan). The grey ochre is amazing, its from Stoneground paint which is sold in a pan format. A pan is a solidified chunk of paint in a small plastic container. I had to take it out of its container, and used a 4 pound sledgehammer to break a chunk off! Another difference is no carbon black, I'll go without it for awhile, the grey ochre is a gentler version of the black. You see the Montreal palette is all about brown, green, grey, blue and pylon orange. All ready for the summer.
Refined Palette 5 x 7" cold press, watercolour, March 2021 (No. 2597b)
No comments:
Post a Comment