My watercolor palette

Watercolor colors low rez
Originally uploaded by shellyinseattle

I picked up some new colors for my birthday and finally got a palette that would truly organize my watercolors rather than taking them from the tubes each time I used them.

I can't wait to play with them!

I placed them roughly in a color wheel format, but since I hadn't used a number of these before they're not in the exactly places where I'd put them now that I've really tested them out on paper.

Hodgepodge
My husband kindly gave me my first artist-quality watercolors from his collection. Over the last few years, I've acquired a few as necessary when I did specific calligraphy projects.

Finally, I felt I was doing enough additions of watercolor to my works, especially with transparent stained-glass effects, that I justified taking my birthday money straight to Daniel Smith last week to fill in the gaps. Though it's not the way I'd have acquired them if I were starting out fresh, building a collection a bit at a time eased some of the financial pain.

I tried not to get too many new ones that overlapped with the gouaches I already have. Hence my favorite color, cobalt blue, isn't on here.

NOTE: I'm very lucky to have a Daniel Smith store just a few miles from my home. They're one of the premier art stores in the U.S. and they also make many of their own artist-quality paints.

PrimaTeks
The first new set I picked up are the PrimaTeks, derived from grinding actual stones. Rhodalite (bottom left), Lapis Lazuli (bottom right), Turquoise (upper right) are some of the stunning examples.

I plan on using these both to make my nature illustrations look more natural and to make my illuminated lettering more historical.

Most of them have a lovely granulating quality (i.e., the pigment settles unevenly so it looks more pebbly). The Purpurite and Sodalite in the bottom right show this off especially well.

Quinacridones
After I put the watercolors into the palette (designed by Stephen Quiller who I mentioned in yesterday's post), I noticed I had very few oranges, reds, pinks, violets, and purples. I decided I'd pick up Daniel Smith's Quinacridone Set.

I felt these colors would liven up a number of my works and wanted some more transparent colors in addition to the mostly granulating qualities of the PrimaTeks.

True Color Wheel
Because it was built in such a hodgepodge fashion, it hasn't been constructed to have exactly complementary matches all around like my gouache palette. (And, I do have more gouaches than just these.)

Since I already have a true color wheel, I felt freer to experiment, choosing new additions that I felt would work in the contemporary updates of historical styles I already do. Especially with the stained glass effects I like so much and that pop in my scanned work.

Gouache Colorwheel

Gouache Colorwheel after Quiller low rez
Originally uploaded by shellyinseattle

This year, I've been working on color.

One of the color gurus, Stephen Quiller, has written a some good books including Color Choices.

I had a number of his suggested colors already in my palette, but after reading his book I added the rest. Now I have his complete version of the color wheel, which lets me quickly figure out which colors I want to use for new works.

I found it especially useful when creating, Gift of Water earlier this year. Specifically, my first real use of viridian and phtalo blue were in this piece.

Vibrant Neutrals
Quiller chose his colors to be both the most useful for mixing AND be the closest he could get to true complementary colors. For example, Cadmium Red is the complement to Cerulean Blue.

As you mix these colors across the wheel, they turn into neutral shades with a great deal more depth than they would if you merely shaded one with black. The inner most three rings of my wheel show these neutrals as I gradually mixed more of one color towards the other.

Another neat trick
Gouaches are opaque, but if you apply them in light coats they look more translucent -- like regular watercolors. The other three rings of my color wheel are merely diluting the gouache with more and more water to obtain lighter colors. No tinting the gouache with white.

Full Strength color
The fourth ring (counting in either direction) shows what the gouache looks like at full strength. That's how dark I can get it straight from the tube with only a little water added for even spreading.

Special thanks to Louise Grunewald for discussing Quiller's palette in her workshop that I took last year.