Watercolor Painting - Techniques - Minimal Palettes

Minimal Palettes

Palette is also the term for a specific selection of paints (or "colors"). Though commercial watercolor brands typically include up to 100 or more paint colors in tubes, subtractive pigment mixtures can produce a complete range of colors from a small number of specific paints. Indeed, as a matter of economy, convenience or technique, painters have often preferred palettes comprising the smallest practical selection of paints.

The smallest practical palette consists of one dark neutral paint, typically including a carbon black pigment or, in works before 1800, a sepia ink. As this single paint can only communicate value gradations from full strength (dark) to white paper, it produces monochrome images, often supplemented and sharpened by an underdrawing or additions in pen and ink.

A familiar choice is the "primary" palette consisting of a magenta (traditionally but inaccurately identified as "red"), yellow and cyan (traditionally "blue") paint, each representing a subtractive primary color. This palette can mix all possible hues, though the purple, orange and green mixtures are characteristically rather dull or dark, and most color mixtures require use of all three paints. The primary palette is therefore useful to demonstrate that compactness also affects convenience (the difficulty involved in mixing any common color) and color saturation (generally, the paint mixture gamut or total number of unique colors it is possible to mix with a palette). Note that Leonardo, in his notebooks, cited red, yellow, green and blue (along with white and black) as the "painter's primaries", though he may not have had a specific palette in mind; but replacing the cyan paint with a deep blue paint (such as ultramarine blue), and adding a green paint, greatly improves the saturation of both purple and green mixtures in a compact four paint selection, and allows a dark neutral or black to be mixed directly, using only red and green.

In the 19th century a six paint "split primary" palette was introduced and is still advocated today as a solution to the mixing limitations of the three paint "primary" palette. It is based on the three traditional subtractive primary colors (red, yellow and blue), each in a "warm" and "cool" version (specific pigments listed as examples for each color choice):

  • "warm" yellow: Cadmium Yellow Medium (PY35)
  • "cool" yellow: Cadmium Lemon (PY35)
  • "warm" red: Cadmium Scarlet (PR108)
  • "cool" red: Quinacridone Carmine (PV19)
  • "warm" blue: Ultramarine Blue (PB29)
  • "cool" blue": Phthalo Blue (Green Shade) (PB15).

This selection was advocated so that bright or saturated mixtures could be produced by related primary colors, e.g. the brightest orange is the mixture of a yellow with some red in it (warm yellow) and a red with some yellow in it (warm red); the brightest green is the mixture of a yellow with some blue in it (cool yellow) with a blue with some yellow in it (cool blue). This palette is nearly always justified with the specious argument that paints are "impure" carriers of "primary color", a misunderstanding of subtractive color mixture that appears in Michel-Eugene Chevreul's "Simultaneous Color Harmony and Contrast" published in 1839.

A modern approach to the six paint palette (trademarked in the printing industry as a "hexachrome" palette) jettisons the "impure paint" rationalization and simply focuses on obtaining the largest gamut from a limited selection of available pigments. This leads to a more equal spacing of paints around the hue circle, and the inclusion of a green paint. As a result the mixture of any two paints adjacent on the hue circle usually produces the most saturated color mixtures for every hue between them (specific pigments listed as examples for each color choice):

  • yellow: Cadmium Yellow Pale (PY35 or PY37) or Benzimidazolone Yellow (PY151 or PY154)
  • red orange: Pyrrol Orange (PO73) or Cadmium Scarlet (PR108)
  • magenta: Quinacridone Magenta (PR122) or Quinacridone Rose (PV19)
  • blue violet: Ultramarine Blue (PB29)
  • cyan: Phthalo Turquoise (PB16) or Phthalo Cyan (PB17)
  • green: Phthalo Green (PG7 Blue Shade or PG36 Yellow Shade).

Both the "split primary" and "hexachrome" palettes obtain dull or darkened colors, including a "neutral" (dark gray or black), by mixing together paints or colors on opposite sides of the hue circle—especially orange or scarlet with cyan, and carmine or magenta with green.

As a matter of convenience, painters typically also add one or more paints made with an iron oxide pigment (the so-called "earth" pigments) and sold under the marketing names yellow ochre, raw sienna, raw umber, burnt sienna, burnt umber and/or venetian red. Exactly the same brown or ochre colors can be matched with either of the six paint palettes, but it is tedious to do. As dark colors also require inconvenient mixing, most painters prefer to add a premixed dark neutral paint containing a carbon (black) pigment and a tinting pigment to produce a slight color bias, usually sold under the marketing names indigo, payne's gray, neutral tint or sepia.

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