June Palette Update, colour saturation

If you followed last year you know I posted regular palette cleanser paintings that were a lot of fun. I plan to do those again using the Van Gogh student paints and a new pad of the same watercolour paper I had used from Fabriano. This one was just a quick sketch made as I prepared the new paint out for June's palette update.
 

Canary Condo Island,  sketchbook, watercolour 9 x 6" 2021

 

I am still using the 18 slot Holbein palette, it is an exact model that I had used for over 5 years. The old one was being held together with duct tape, aluminum wire, and had developed cracks after the winter painting. Apparently they don't design watercolour palettes for sub zero temperatures. The paint choice and ordering has been tweaked a little. Perylene red is up with the earth colours, I use it to increase the chroma on the red earth paints, or to make a red shadow if the object is red. I brought PG7 back, it is superb for making turquoise, and for greening up any mixture. A lighter, yellower orange (PO62) replaces the duller redder orange I had for mixing greens (PO36). Finally, I found a spot for pyrole red ferrari (PR255) just above its buddy pyrole red fire engine (PR254).

Out of curiosity I wanted to find out what was the saturated hue looked like for the blue and green paints, partly because the scientist in me recently deconstructed the colour of a rolling hill.  Here are the colour picks with maximum saturation digitally enhanced with Image J.

 Perylene green (PBk31):

Phthalo green yellow shade (PG36):

Phthalo green blue shade (PG7):

 

Phthalo blue Sapphire (PB15):

Cobalt Blue (PB28):

Indothrone blue (PB60):

What to make of this? The first one PBk31 perylene green appears to be the greenest of the lot, even though it appears to be a dark almost black paint. The phthalo greens are similar, both have a teal/turquoise tint. The phthalo blue and cobalt blue are very similar, while the indo blue is a true blue (not a blue violet really). The hue range is narrower than I thought- so to make dark chartreuse I need to add yellow to perylene green, and to make dark neutral blue violet requires some quinacridone magenta. Of course, you can never get the type of saturation you see in the digital images above, unless the paint contains additives. There is a new kind of paint they are marketing as super bright, but I noticed the adverts shine incredibly bright spot lights on the works, that is a known trick that galleries use to fool customers into seeing bright colours.