Spring Palette Adjustments

With the weather apparently getting better (who could tell?) I opted for some palette adjustments. The main additions were raw sienna (PBr7 from Daniel Smith Co.), and my old favorite phthalo green blue shade (PG7 from Holbein). Raw sienna is like the colour of toasted marshmallow, or warm caramel. It is good for certain types of bricks, and for when the sun is shining on a tree or the sidewalk. Phthalo green blue shade is a blue-green paint that does not appear in nature but can be used to make convincing turquoise with a blue paint, and a neat metallic grey when mixed with magenta paints. It is one of the only paints I have been using for almost the whole 35 years of watercolour painting. 

To make room for the two colours I removed my extra blobs of yellow paint and shifted the rest of them around in a kind of musical chairs. The other change was to remove pyrol orange red shade (PO73) and replace it with benzimidazolone orange (PO62). The new orange is a perfect middle orange without the red tint. I liked pyrol orange for night painting but it was not as useful during the day. When I go night painting next time I will bring a different palette that is optimized for night. 

This palette has eleven warm colours, eight cool colours, and black. It is a decidedly warm palette with plenty of earth paints. In my recent stroll down to Monkland Village I tested out the new setup and found it to be very flexible and easy to use. The phthalo green blue shade came in handy for the bus and car windshields, and I was able to make a scarlet red by mixing the benzi orange with the pyrol red for the fire hydrant.