How To Curate Your Watercolor Palette - Color Theory for Beginners

1. Introduction: Have you ever wanted to actually start fresh with your colors to create your own watercolor palette? Or even just to update and adapt the palette that you've got to more suit your needs, your preferences, and the colors that you really enjoy using. If so, today is the class for you. My name is Toby. I'm an ink and watercolor sketch. I use a loose, pretty abstract style to create urban sketches and landscape sketches. And with that comes a need for at a fun palette of colors which is sometimes a bit different from those palettes which you can buy pre made. Today, I want to give you the benefit of my experience mistakes experiments to show you how I, over the years, have created my palette. I am starting fresh. I'm going to be creating my own new watercolor palette today. And I'm going to talk you through every decision going right from the beginning, literally which palette should I use and why am I even creating wearing palette when there are so many curated palettes we can buy already on the market? I'm going to explain the idea of using pans versus tubes of paint and the cheapest way to create our own palette as well. We'll look at how to swatch our colors. And when we swatch our colors, that's when things become clear and exciting. We can look then at different sizes of palette. And along the way, even in this short class, what we can do is we can look at how we could create a really minimalist three or four color palette. How we can expand that and make it more versatile with a 68 color palette. And then how we can add a little bit of convenience, a little bit of sort of luxury, and really explore the properties of watercolors with a 12 color palette. By the end of the day, you will have all the confidence and knowledge you need to start either creating your perfect palette from scratch or adapting the palette you already have. Perhaps with one or two new colors, which will just give your art that little zing, that little lift, and give you that little burst of creativity that you need to get you motivated to sketch. And with all of that said and done, why don't we just start, why don't we start having a look at our watercolors? How we can create our perfect minimalist palette. And our perfect, more versatile bigger 12 color palette. 2. Our Project: The project today, if you choose to accept it, is of course to consider your palette, to curate the colors in your Palett. For me, I'm going to be starting fresh. I've learned some new things about colors recently. I'll mention that at the end one of the last lesson, where I just talk about some cautionary things about colors. That's got me thinking, what a great opportunity to refresh my palette. So I'm going to take you through how I would pick my three color palette, my six color palette, my eight color palette, or my 12 color palette, which is the palette I will finish with. If you want to create a brand new 12 color palette with me, please do. If you just want to explore the colors you have and see if there's one or two colors you might want to change or adapt. Brilliant. Even better if you just want to take the opportunity to swatch loads of colors and see which ones you enjoy. That's fantastic too. What I'd love to see you post as your project would be either a picture of your palette, picture of your palette swatched out, or just some experimental watercolor swatches along with your kind of thoughts. Anything you learn, any tips or tricks you have for other people. Because learning from one another is how we discover new things about our art, our craft, and how to get the best out of our paints. 3. Why Your Should Create Your Own Palette: Firstly, we need to think about why we are curating a palette. It is perfectly acceptable. In fact, it's a very good idea to start your artistic journey with a pre curated palette. A pre curated palette has a selection of colors which is broad and versatile and very well balanced. Normally for a fraction, probably quite a big fraction, but a fraction nonetheless, of the cost of buying all your own colors individually. There are beginners versions. The Windsor Newton Cotman is an excellent example of a beginner version. There are other more budget brands or an Amazon as well. And then you can get really expensive and high performing pigments like Daniel Smith, Windsor, Newton professional as well. Great place to start, but soon you might find yourself with itchy feet. You might find you're not using all the colors and you're heavily using some and you need to replace them. Well, it's at this point I'd recommend thinking about how you're using your colors. Which ones are your favorite? Is there something you wish you had? Do you wish you had fewer colors? For me, some of these pre created sets have too many colors and everything gets messy. So we can start reflecting on what we want as artists. What actually do we want from our colors? For example, there's a couple of specifics. If you are a portrait painter, you might want more pinks, neutrals for shadows, browns and earth tones for darker skins. Rather than having to mix everything from just maybe you've got a yellow, yellow ochre and a burnt sienna in your normal planet. It's just much easier to have a more diverse range of earth tones to start with. Similarly, if you're a landscape artist or a botanist, you might want a diverse range of greens. Rather than mixing everything from the same old blue and yellow. Then we move into other things we'll be discussing in this class, like watercolor effect and personal preferences. Loads of reasons to curate your own palette. Next what we're going to talk about is how to choose the right palette for you and what's the best palette that you can start curating your colors into. 4. Which Palette is best?: There is no best palette, of course there's no best palette. We have different things that we often think of as palettes. For example, this is a palette, this is a clover leaf ceramic mixing palette. In this, you would pour out tubes of paint, super little blobbing like I've got here. And then you paint directly from that without allowing it to dry normally. That's great, and if you are using this kind of palette, you will definitely be buying tubes of paint as your sort of collection allows you to be more versatile. You could have 40 colors and only ever use three or four in a given painting, but you just get the colors out that you want to use brill. It's not what I do and it's mostly not what we're talking about today. I'm talking about this kind of palette. So a small metal or plastic palette holds anything from six to sometimes 48 colors. And inside this one's knife and Meffy, you have all these little pans or these are half pans, they hold a mill or two of paint. Now my favorite of the metal, they're hardwaring, you can throw the, flash them around and not worry about them. And they have these little loops on the back which your fun goes into. And now I can paint standing up. So that is the kind of power I love. But there are other options. This is cheap. This is not expensive. But there are also very affordable options that you can find out and about. What we're going to answer in the next video is tubes or pans. 5. Tubes or Pans?: Tubes or pans? There's no real right answer here. As I mentioned, if you're using a mixing tubes is your answer. If you're using another palette, well, you might think pans is your answer. But you can also buy empty pans. They come in really big bags for not very much money. And you can fill with your own colors to fill them. You just take a, you squeeze it out, squeeze it, so it's about a half full. And that means you can let it dry for a day or two. And if you want to fill it up to make it really neat and to level it out, you can do that or you can just paint from a half filled pan. The advantage of this, it's much cheaper if you look at the cost of pans and how much paint you're getting versus a tube. Get a lot more paint for your money with tubes. The disadvantage is some tubes won't dry out as you expect them to. It's always worth doing a little test, all having a discussion online with people who you know. Try and scram message people who use the brand you use and just find out, you know, do these brands work well if I'm going to try them out. From my experience, Daniel Smith works really well. Most Winsor Newton work really well. And most of the budget brands also work really well used in this way. 6. How and Why to Swatch: An important part of curating a palette is actually being able to examine your colors in what do we want to say. Not a scientific fashion, but a repeatable fashion. Now, this can get very expensive, but there are things like this. This is a Doc card for not very much money. Most brands, certainly the major brands, will produce these. And you can see literally over 200 dots of paint here. I would suggest as a starting point, getting something like this, if you don't like me, have lots of tubes of paint lying around. We then want to use something like that to simply swatch out our colors and find out a little bit about them. Now I would suggest swatching something like this. I actually have available to download some print or copyable templates you can use to swatch. The first thing is to swatch the mask stone. That's where we get a block of paint, all equal consistency, just like we would normally paint a medium wash that lets us see what the color looks like. Flat, it gives us a true idea of the hue, the shade of the color. Then we want to see how it graduates. So going from rich and then adding more and more water, or doing stripes down the page until our brush dries out. Seeing how it varies with the amount of water on the page or on our brush. That gives us an idea of the variety, how rich, how pale, what's going to actually look like in different types of wash. Finally, I would recommend doing some specialty tests. One for me is wet and wet. Put a blob of water on your page and just let that color dance around that water by touching it in. That will show you how it interacts with water, how it spreads, whether it granulates or produces really interesting textures. We can also try and identify whether it's transparent or opaque, and these are things that we'll be looking at later on as well. 7. Primary Colour Palette: Now we can go to finally building the beginning of our palette. The first thing I'd suggest is creating a free color palette. And this is a palette which is completely viable on its own. I've used lots and lots of painting if you're going on holiday, sometimes you just think, let's just take something really minimal. My three color palette has a simple rule. Pick three punchy, bright, lovely primary colors, red, a yellow, and a blue. You want them all to stand up on their own, so that we don't pick a really pale yellow, which we can't really see and gets lost amongst the others. That's going to mean you can mix bright colors, punchy colors, and deep blacks or browns from a combination of all three. To discover which are all punchy colors, we can do formal swatches. Or actually, what I'd recommend as a starting point is just to do some informal swatches here. For example, I can compare hands of yellow as a yellow, nickel tighten yellow as I swatch those out, hopefully you can see hands of yellow as a yellow. They're nice and punchy, they already hold their weight. Nickel tightener yellow is much paler. Then another color, Mars yellow, when we swatch it out, doesn't really look like a yellow. So it would be a challenging primary to include in our free color palette. We can do the same with blues and reds. And from this, for me, my favorites, and this is all it is. There's nothing clever about this. All I'm doing for my free color palette is going. My favorites are azo yellow, ultramarine blue, and paroline scarlet. So there you go. A simple way to choose your three color palette. If you want to add a bit more variety, then I'd suggest adding a neutral or earthy brown. And we'll cover that in a couple of lessons time. 8. BONUS - Colour Wheels: This is something of a little bonus lesson. I didn't really know where this should fit, so I thought, well, let's just create an extra lesson. What we're doing here is we are creating a color wheel in the simplest way possible. You can see I've drawn two rectangles, basically forming the point of the rectangle with these three circles. In those three circles, I'm putting my primaries on the left, I've put my initial primaries on the right, I've put the paired primaries. This is my six color palette. By doing this, this is the absolute simplest way to create a color wheel. The color wheel basically shows us as we move from one primary round to the next, What colors can we mix? This is what will show you just how different the paired primaries and the punchy primaries are from one another. And all I'm going to do now is gradually mix. I've got red with blue and then a bit more blue, and then even more blue still. And you can see we move from cool red right the way from purple to a warm blue back to of course blue. I'll do the same with my yellow and my red. We can see how we move from a golden yellow through to an orange through to just almost off red or a pinky red even. So what we're trying to do here is just really just demonstrate what our colors can achieve. When you've completed this with just your punchy primaries or your paired primaries, what you'll be able to do is then mix it around. So you mix up a couple of punchy primaries, one pared primary. You can also do other more fancy things, which I'm sure you'll be able to work out and find out with a little bit of research. For example, in the middle of our color wheel, we can start adding depth to the colors of adding a darker color and seeing what happens as those colors move into the center. Or adding light or more water to the colors and seeing what happens as they move out. Our color wheel can build up all realms of complexity and realms of challenge, and also realms of information that it can show us about our colors and how they respond in different situations here already. Hopefully you can see that just by having these two different blues and yellows, we've got very different greens emerging. That's only on these two combinations. Of course, we could mix my ultra maine with the Mars yellow. We could mix my Azo yellow with the manganese blue. We'd get even more greens. There's way more we could do beside that as well. Just as a little side project, what I suggest doing is popping three circles onto your page in a little triangle shape and doing it again on another page. And then working out what do each of these triples of color to? What do your primary, what do your paired primaries to? What secondary colors can you get from your six color palette? And you'll probably be amazed at the versatility that you have already produced. 9. Warm vs Cool - Pairing our primaries: We have now got our initial colors. We've swatched out our colors like this. We've picked which ones are punching bright. But we can see some other differences here, can we? We can see that not all these reds are made equal, and not all these blues are made equal. In fact, they have slightly different senses, or perhaps not just hue, but temperature. That's how we come across our six color palette. We are now looking at the temperature of our colors. The temperature can be cool, bluey green, Even a blue for example, swatching here. A fallow green shade has a greenish shue. It's more cool than, say, an ultra marine, which is slightly closer to a purple, which has that sense of red, orange in it. Similarly, some of the reds feel more warm and pink and bright, and some others feel more held back in the distance. That's the thing. The cool colors literally feel further back, and the warm colors, literally in a painting, will feel closer to you. So advantage number one of pairing our colors is that we get that variety of distance Advantage number two is if we mix them here, I'm mixing ultramarine blue at the top. And then I'm going to mix fallow blue green shade at the bottom with the same azo yellow in both and the same paroline scarlet in both. Look at the dramatically different mixes we get. So we can see that just by pairing our primaries, suddenly the variety in what we're going to be able to paint, the colors we're going to be able to create is going to just go off the chart. So now all I'm going to ask you to do is have a little look at which colors you feel you could pair with another color. Classic example, a warm blue would be something like a cobalt blue or ultramarine blue. A cool blue, very commonly with cerulean blue. For me, I'm using a manganese blue hue. In the yellows, we're looking at those winds or yellows or hands yellows as the punch yellows. I'm going to use my Azo yellow, that's warmer. It's more orange versus nickel titanate yellow or something like a lemon yellow is a bit cooler. When we get to the red, again, we're looking at is it magenta or scarlet, or more orange if we want. For example, a warm red, a classic would be a cadmium red hue or a primary red. A cooler red might, for example, be something more like a crimson or a rinacraton. Magenta, or permanent anazerin crimson. That's where we've added a little bit of blue, gone towards that blue green, cooler shade. For me, this is where I get off the rails because we're going to move into this personalized bit of our palette. Now, I know I never use cool yellows. Instead of my cool yellow, I'm adding that Mars yellow, which is actually a bit of an earthy tone, which is what we're talking about next. And then I'm going to add manganese blue hue, and I'm going to add a quin aquidone magenta, which is a long way down the cool red spectrum. Next we're going to talk about how to expand by another couple of colors with some neutrals and some Earth colors. 10. Earths and Neutrals: Whether you're here after you've made a three color palette or a six color palette, the next step is to add something to make it more earthy, more grounded. To give you a real depth across that spectrum of colors we can create. When we add in neutrals, earthy browns, we suddenly open the world of landscapes up and the world of mood. Having just primary colors gives us very bright and cheerful colors. But it's a bit like painting a cartoon or painting in primary school. Everything's a bit too happy and it doesn't quite feel real. This is where we get to explore those wonderful neutrals and those wonderful earthtones. There are so many to choose from. Let's have a little look at the start of what we could do. I'm just swatching out a few different here. I wouldn't you just take a little bit of attention as you do it to see what is happening with these colors? First, I've got lunar F, which is definitely an Earth tone next to Cation in Siena. Notice now that these earthtones aren't just different in color and feel, they're also very different in texture. We'll get onto that more later, but it's now that we want to start noticing that equally, I'm going to use several very neutral colors. It's got graphite, neutral tint, indigo, which is on the bluer end of neutral soda Lite bluer still then Van **** brown, which is moving back to the brown end of neutral. All of these things are both very similar, but they also end up looking rather different. My tip for including just a couple of these colors is to see which work really well together. For me, I've always used quacdonciena and indigo, because when I mix them together, notice how they get orange, brown, neutral blue, and almost black. Just two colors in such a diverse range that I know, it's great for my palette and I know how to use it. That's a lot of what this is about. There are other really classic examples though, to use, which you'll find in many pre curated palettes. Those would be things like a burnt umber, raw umber, lots of people like moon glow. Now we'll talk about why we might want to take a little bit of care with some pigments, but moon Go certainly is a very lovely pigment. We'll mention it when we move on to the luxury colors at the very end. For now though, get a couple of colors which work really well together. That is your seven or eight color pallet to go, and this is a diverse pale. Everything we're adding from now on is just frankly greedy but wonderful. But from this, we should be able to mix everything we need. Everything we need to create basically any landscape portrait. With a little bit of thinking, a little bit of work. Next we're going to make life easier and convenient with our convenience colors. 11. Convenience Colours: Our convenience colors. These colors are basically secondary colors. Typically something like greens and purples. Things which we could easily mix but actually even more easily we can have them pre made in our panel. A classic example would be something like a sap green for a botanical artist. I mentioned before having lovely pinks and more earth tones for portrait artists. As an urban sketcher, we often like to have really bright, punchy, happy colors. Or colors which have other textures. Again, something we're going to mention in the next lesson. For now, this is a really short one. What I would recommend doing is simply thinking about what subjects you paint, which colors you really love, which aren't primary colors, And give you something which you just can't easily mix or don't want to mix every time you use it, because you use it so often, and add 123 of those colors into your palette. For me, I'm going to be adding green, appetite, genuine, and as one of my key colors here. The reason is, it's a lovely earfy, rich green which granulates and gives me something extra to work with. And I'm going to be adding quina coton coral. Something you might also use if you like sketching skin phones or botanical art. Because it's a bright, punchy pink. And for me, really fun to use in slightly abstract lovely urban sketches. 12. Luxury Colours: Last but not least, we're on to luxury colors. Now, luxury colors, or I couldn't think of a better word from match you, but they're the colors that we just love, we just really like. And that's our only excuse for adding a minutes where we get for me apply watercolor effects to things. When we looked earlier at how to switch, I mentioned testing for wet. Wet on wet is where you can see the textures. For example, if I drop in green gold into the water, we get this rapid spread of bright yellow green onto the page. It's really lovely. It's an amazing effect. It feels like a kind of sun shining across, actually, literally moving across the lawn. It's very flat. Now if I drop lunar black onto that page. Or may and blue, look at the difference in texture. That is granulation, that is where heavy granules of pigment are sitting on our page and creating a granular texture, amazing for landscapes, amazing for abstract art. And increasingly commonly used by urban sketchers who want, like me to cheat our way to creating texture, to make texture really easy on a page instead of having to fuss and fa, the painting process. I guess we're trying to use our watercolors to maximize the effect of the watercolors celebrate the medium, not just slavishly paint. That's number one effect I'd recommend looking out for. Number two effect I'd recommend looking out for is transparency. Transparency. Generally, we're looking for colors which are really clear. If I paint Inacotonciena over a couple of black lines, we can see those lines really easily. If I paint lavender as a semi opaque color, it covers the lines. If we have lots of colors like that, it risks becoming muddy. And that's not what water colors are about. However, a couple of colors like that are wonderful. Lavender is going straight in my palette, is one of my favorite colors. If I use gue zinc white on my lines, you can see it almost completely blocks them out. For me, that is too much for my palette. It is going to make my paintings muddy, Lack that water of color fluency that is not going in my palette. There are other lovely, semiupaque colors you might want to try out if you have a Doc card. Naples yellow typically is Semupaque, as is buff titanium. There are two really commonly used colors. One thing you might notice in some cheaper brands is they are often a little bit opaque. The reason being, they add brighteners in to make their pigments brighter and affordable. You might find, for example, with some of those cheaper brands, that a lot of your colors feel a bit opaque. And as you move into more professional or expensive colors, they'll become more and more transparent. It's not meaning you have to spend money, but it's just something to be aware of. The next video, the final video as we wrap up will just be a couple of other things to be aware of. Including that little reference I made a couple of lessons ago about Moon clone. 13. Warnings!: Now, things to be aware of now, The first isn't a big issue. The first is fugitive colors. This is where moon glow comes in. There are some colors which are well known as Fugitive Alizarin. Crimson is one such color in most brands In the traditional form, if you paint it and leave it in the sun within a few weeks to months, all that red will have gone. Your painting will look totally different. Not good If you're planning to hang up your paintings or sell them, absolutely fine. If you're going to scan them, keep them in sketchbooks. But something definitely to be aware of on the back of tubes, it should say. Certainly on the product owners or product creators websites, the manufacturers websites, it will say whether they are light fast or not. The opposite of light fast is fugitive. The next is a little more important, we'll say it's on the back of all of these labels and certainly of the major brands you should see an ACM label. Now that ACMI label will either be present and say AP approved product, that means it has no toxins in. If that label is missing it might say cautionary label CL which means there's a toxin in there. It might say P 65 which means there's a toxin in there. Or it might say nothing, which means there might be a toxin in the even some paints like the Zinc white. Zinc technically shouldn't go down the drains in most countries or most places that I'm aware of that says approved product on it. We need to be aware that in our paints there are potential toxins. The toxins are unlikely, if we're not eating the paints. Unlikely to be bad for us. But if we were all to throw lots of cadmium, lots of cobalt, down the drain, then it could be bad for the environment. There are ways around this. You can filter it. You can literally put it through coffee filters. You can let your paints evaporate, you can throw your water into a bucket of sand and let it evaporate. And then throw away the dry waste at your local pump, as we call it in the UK local rubbish center, whatever you call it. It's a really important thing, which I'm only recently become more aware of. I feel silly for not being more aware of it earlier. But it is something to look into. Just check, is your brand as safe as you think it is? Not just for you, which is unlikely to be a major problem for, but also for the environment. And also for the people manufacturing the paints. And also for the people mining the cobalt and zinc and things that make up some of our paints. With that, you've got to do what's right for you. So I'm not going to instruct anyone to do anything, I'm just making you aware. The most important thing is to basically have a positive outlook and enjoy the process and be aware of our decisions, and be making the decisions which fit our values. 14. The most important step...: With that, hopefully you've had the opportunity to create your palette. We last most important step is not to consider this palette, these 361012 colors. Whatever you've done to be your final palette, I change a color here or there every month or two. Sometimes more often, sometimes less often. We adapt and evolve. Our color palettes are things which adapt and evolve with us and our style and peculiarities and our subjects and what we enjoy painting. Be prepared to adapt, explore, invent new things. Try different combinations out. Be prepared sometimes to throw everything out and start from fresh. What I would say is always give yourself time to get to know your colors. It takes a while to really understand how they work. And sometimes you might discover a, this one needs a little more water and it looks magical. I was just painting with it in the way I expected it to work, rather than the way it really does work. Give yourself some time, some freedom to make mistakes, and explore, and have some fun. If you've enjoyed this, please do leave me a review. Means the world. I'd love to see your palette. Either a picture of your palette, the swatches you've been doing along with your forks. Anything you learned today, anything that will adapt or change your practice, your art. You can also follow me here. You can find me at Toby Sketch Loose on Instagram and on Youtube and on Sketch Loose, stop code at UK, on my website. Thank you so much for joining in a bit of a different class. Hope you enjoyed it. Happy Sketching. Happy Painting.