I mentioned in a previous post that my fresh gouache palette had some limitations I was finding as I used it for various subjects, so I whipped up a mixing chart this weekend to check my instincts¡
it’s a chart where on each axis I’ve lined up the colours in ROYGBIV order, and filled the intersections with their mixes. the top right triangle has also had white mixed into the mixes to show me tints of the darker colors, which is very helpful.
My instincts had told me i was missing a hot orange and a range of more saturated greens and teals, and this chart has been a way to actually check my math properly.
Firstly, we do have a nice hot orange available in that basic yellow*red mix, but what we don’t have is saturated bright pinks – my chosen red paint desaturates so fast when i add white! So while it isn’t exactly the problem i thought, i can see how it’s still a challenging palette for a particular range of skin tones.
Secondly, yes, this spread of greens is indeed limited – I’m missing punchy saturation in the darks and the lights of it, and it’s hard to get much by way of pretty cooler greens. Great for a sun-baked deciduous forest, but not much else.
I’m also missing a really punchy dark! the perylene black, that extremely dark green, is my deepest value, but in person it can’t compete with an ivory, lamp or jet black. I often resist including a black on my gouache palette, likely leftover from art school oil painting advice, but honestly gouache needs help reaching its full value range and a good black pigment makes a big difference.
Also, i picked yellow ochre AND Naples yellow for this palette, and I don’t think i needed both. the yellow ochre I’m using is a pretty light pigment for that colour already, but then the Naples yellow isn’t so bright and opaque that it works as a secondary mixing white or anything. I think next time I’ll likely pick a much more opaque earth tone, and maybe a bright pink instead of the Naples yellow.
The standing wisdom for creating a palette is to make sure you have a cool and warm version of all your primaries, and then often a dark Earth tone or black, and with opaque media a good white.
I think for me the other layer i find comes up often with gouache palettes is to try and make sure i have a range of values represented in each primary colour family. A saturated dark colour will desaturate dramatically as you add white, and a saturated light colour will turn into a dead tint very fast if you try to darken it without changing the hue. So if you want to have both a hot light pink and a deep velvety maroon in your gouache painting, in my experience you likely need two different paints that support those different values.
This means that 16 colours is likely not quite enough for me, at least the way i work! but I’ve really been enjoying the fresh gouache palette, especially now i have clove oil to stave off the mould, so i ended up ordering a new palette with 36 watertight wells. It’s coming from overseas, so I’ll see it later this month, but I’m very excited to set that up when it arrives! this means in the meantime my main goal with my current palette is just to use up what’s there, so i won’t be making too many changes to my current spread. but maybe sticking with it and its limits will help me find the beauty of this colour gamut. I’ll let you all know!
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