After rebuilding my entire colour palette during the pandemic year, its been pretty much stable for the past several years. In the paint-out above you can see the range I use on location. Top left are earth paints, top middle are cool shadow paints, top right are green range, bottom left are highlight colours, with a blob of black paint off to the right. I keep a few within the mixing areas, like raw sienna, pyrol orange, indo blue, and for the Spring I carry bismuth yellow for depicting new foliage. So there are a little over 20 paints here, with some duplicates. The scribbles are the pigment codes, which are usually marked on the tube somewhere. I go to Jane Blundell's website to look up pigment codes and paint names on her
colour swatches. Also Handprint.com by MacEvoy has a tome of knowldege in his
guide to watercolours page.
Winnipeg surprised me with its subtle colouration. To be fair, I was there in Spring about a week before the green started to come out, so things were rather dusty, or rather sandy. The earth around Winnipeg comes from the great plains, grassy lands, its a sandy colour the same as raw sienna. They use this sand to put on the snow in the winter, so streets and parking lots were still covered in it. Moreover, the bricks of many older buildings were sandstone... a yellow ochre tone that could be easily made with variations of earth paints. There are prominent trees... not too tall, fanning out like mops pointing up, and with scraggly branches. They were painted with raw umber a dark brown, and indo blue to create greyish brown. Its the first time I ran out of brown paint on one of my palettes. I bring two palettes when I travel now so as to not run out. In the painting above, I mixed various yellow and brown colours, and called the painting Winni-beige, a play on words.
Winni-beige, watercolour 9 x 12" watercolour paper, May 2026
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