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Thursday, December 28, 2017

Color Theory - Those Tertiary Colors!

Claudia Nice, author of Painting with Color, Pen and Ink (2002), is an artist that resonates with my developing painting interests and style. Our artistic approaches: transparent watercolors with touches of ink! 

And when I saw her color wheel, I realized that our favorite color choices (the mixed colors) fell in the same color range as well. What I also realized from her color wheel below is that those favorite color mixes were equally spaced on the color palette and principally are tertiary colors. What an eye-opening moment for me! So I'm documenting this moment and in a year or two I'll look back and see how my color choices have changed and/or developed. The future of painting for me is ... still an open palette.

Color wheel taken from Painting with Color, Pen and Ink by Claudia Nice, p 11
color chart based on Grumbacher watercolors
Her colors of choice (grumbacher watercolors) are:
1. gamboge
2. thalo yellow green
3. yellow ochre
4. sap green
5. thalo green
6. burnt sienna
7. sepia
8. brown madder
9. burnt umber
10. payne's gray
11. thalo red (hard to replicate by mixing) 
Another note, Claudia never mentioned red iron oxide in her color choices, but this one, definitely a tertiary color as well, is an absolute must for my palette at the moment! Of course I would switch out several of the colors, but in principle, we have the same taste in color range, which reflects our choice in subject - for Claudia a range of landscape and wildlife, and for me more limited to wildlife in natural settings. 

I have to say, until now my choices of color and paint (M Graham watercolors) have been heavily influenced by Steve at Mind of Watercolor. The limited palette Steve introduced I very much love and several of them will probably always be in my limited palette as well: azo green, indian yellow (or new gamboge), and transparent red iron oxide. 

This chart evoked an interesting realization of the range in which my favorite colors fall -- the tertiaries, principally the earthy reds and greens!

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