Important to note that this post was written with acrylic in mind, watercolors have their own palette choices that work differntly from acrylics. I'll address watercolors in a future post.

Why is palette choice so important to painting en plein air? Ultimately you want to carry the minimal amount of equipment to make the picture happen. You could carry every color you have available but that would make for a very heavy pack and awkward hiking. Using every color available tends to leave a painting with a disharmonious feeling. Paintings tend to have a harmonious feel when colors have been mixed with other colors in the painting. When you using paint straight from the tubes paintings tend to not jive as well as if you’ve added a touch of another color in your palette to the other colors.

The important thing with an en plein air palette is the colors you get by mixing 2 and 3 colors together. Some people use the same palette over and over again and others are constantly rearranging their palette, dropping in a new red or blue or swapping out a yellow. To each their own.

In acrylic I tend to work with the same palette for a warm season and switch to a more expansive palette in the winter months. This is because I usually work mostly inside in the fall and winter whereas in the summer I tend to work on location far more often.

Currently my palette is considered pretty large by plein air standards and it’s highly likely I’ll get rid of a yellow and a blue shade, but we’ll see.

Here are some excellent links on the subject of limiting your palette.

 Gurney

Learning to See

Channeling Homer

Channeling Homer also has a "pamphlet" about palette picking, and it's good

I frequently limit my palette to 2 or 3 colors, usually titanium white, a blue and then a warm color like titan buff or yellow ochre. This is an exercise I may explore again.

Yesterday Jane and I headed to Salem Willows for a little painting. My goal today was to get a handle on my sky and the forms of the trees. Whilst painting I realized that the palette I’ve included in my pochade is not completely right for what I’m doing. Jane and I also had a discussion about palettes and how somethings are right for some things but not others, like portrature verses landscapes.

My current palette is as follows:

• Cad yellow light
• Cad yellow Medium
• Cad Orange
• Aliz Crimson
• Pthalo blue
• Cobalt Blue
• Ultramarine Blue
• Unbleached Titanium white (Titan Buff for you Golden fans)
• Titanium White
• Mars Black

Now to be fair I’ve never included a black in my pochade palette in the past and I just sort of tossed it in on a whim, which is strange to think given how damn small this pochade is and how much smaller it is than my last box.

It is also interesting to note that I don’t have a single earth tone in here- not a drop of raw or burnt umber or sienna. Again, an oddity given my love of earth tones and their heavy use in my watercolor palette. Perhaps I was unconsciously rejecting my watercolor palette? Who knows, but an earth tone or two will be included in the next packing of the pochade. Also, yellow ochre is nowhere to be see.

It’s as if I closed my eyes and picked a palette not really suited to the sort of painting I was planning.

The all of the color except unbleached titanium were colors that my Painting 101 instructor listed on the “to buy list” for the class. Perhaps I was just grabbing some old familiars?

I’ve been trying to mix all the shades of green that I want but the truth is that it’s making me smash my head against the wall. Color mixing is entirely different for watercolors and acrylics. With watercolors it is much easier to mix the shades of green you need from just a few shades of blue and yellow. It is not the same for acrylic. I’m adding pthalo green to the mix. It will replace one of the 3 blues, which I’m not sure but right now I’m leaning toward ultramarine getting kicked out. I’m replacing the black with burnt umber.

This will shock people, given my love for this particular color, but I’m considering kicking Alizarin Crimson out of the box. It’s a great shade of red but for the space in the pochade I can get more mileage out of Napthal red. If I add nappy red (as I like to call it) I’ll also get rid of cad orange. Nappy red makes great oranges with either of the cad yellows. I will keep both cad yellows as they mix with the blues and the pthalo green to make different shades of green.

Cobalt blue may be replaced with cerulean blue but I’m not sure yet. This leaves me with the following:

• Cad yellow light
• Cad yellow Medium
• Cad Orange-
• Aliz Crimson- Napthol red
• Pthalo blue
• Cobalt Blue (questioning this one)
• Ultramarine Blue- Pthalo Green
• Unbleached Titanium white (Titan Buff for you Golden fans)
• Titanium White
• Mars Black– Burnt Umber

After I got back from my art adventure I headed to my studio and dumped the contents of the pochade out and started making color swatches of the colors in the box, to see what colors I could mix by mixing each color with the others in the box. It was enlightening and led to the switches seen above. Then I look through my swatches and I debate removing ultramarine from the mix…

Next up will be mixing a series of swatches from my studio palette. That will take substantially more time, I have 20 or 30 colors of paint. Then… I'll be doing this with my watercolors. This will certainly cut back on my cult of stuff purchases. I have that in check with watercolors, as I've always kept a list in my planner of the watercolors I need to replace. INterestingly enough I rarely stray from that list. Though on the rare occasion i have, I've ended up with colors that I use regularly, like indigo and red ochre.

These are to distract you that I forgot to write my review for the week.

I want to tell you about mixing darks. For years I lived under the impression that a “real artist” doesn’t use black paint, even though it’s a part of many colors, like one of my favorites Payne’s Gray. In school mixing black with anything was definitely frowned upon. Instead we were expected to mix colors together to create deep dark shades. One of my professors taught me a dark that I really like and still use. It’s useful with a variety of colors because it can be mixed warm or cool.

It uses the following 3 colors:

• Pthalo Blue
• Alizarin Crimson
• Pthalo Green

 

For the standard deep dark color, mix all 3 in equal proportions. If you’d like it warmer add more aliz crim.

This recipe can be changed up by mixing in various proportions:

• alizarin crimson
• Pthalo Blue
• Cadmium Yellow Med or Cad Orange

 

Again start with equal amounts of each and adjust the colors to get the shade you want and need.

The various art professors who had issues with black said it “muddied” your colors. To a point that’s true, if you add a TON of black to a mix of colors it can turn to mud and not be clear. That being said, adding a  touch of black to a color will dull it and darken it.

One professor that I had suggested that we use it as a base color for shadows. Where another suggested that we use thalo blue for shadows and another suggested that we use thalo green for shadows.

I’ve found that the truth lies somewhere within the maze of contradictory and fuzzy advice these knowledgeable ladies and gents shared with me oh so many years ago. The core of this whole discussion is that you need to stare at a shadow and decide for yourself what color does it lean towards? Red Blue Green? Depending on what you see you should lean that way.

For me, my shadows lean toward the blue purple side of the spectrum so I start with a touch of pthalo blue and a tough of alizarin crimson hue or quid magenta.

Even though I feel okay using black now, I still tend to make my darks from blends of colors. In the image below that dark dark color is the second blend I wrote about AND I had it lean toward blue.