Choosing Transparent and Opaque Watercolors

As a beginner watercolorist one year ago, I greatly appreciated watercolor artist Steve Mitchell on his YouTube channel, The Mind of Watercolor, explaining that watercolors are not as transparent as most people assume. That piece of info really intrigued me, and I took many of Steve's tutorials on choosing watercolors, papers, brushes, soaking up theory on what I had assumed was just splashing pigment on paper to create a picture. What a great teacher!

I have to say that probably his YouTube clip I most appreciated was his "My Favorite 8 Colors for Watercolor". In it he explained his logic for his favorite eight color preferences. Basically, he avoided opaque colors, which tend to bog down and muddy colors when mixed with other colors, and his preferential eight were colors chosen because of their transparency and luminosity. He stressed that the popular yellow ochre is commonly an opaque "watercolor" (oh really?!), and then Steve proceeded to offer a list of his color palette alternatives in his "How to Avoid Muddy Colors in Watercolor" clip: 

OPAQUE WATERCOLORS (a few of many)

cadmium reds (muddy complements and dull less vibrant colors)

Venetian red (a gorgeous color but weighs down color mixes)

yellow ochre (particularly known for its opacity)

Naples yellow (absolutely opaque in a lot of brands)

cerulean blue (muddies complements and browns)

raw umber (most browns have some opacity, but raw umber particularly so)

black (very opaque in most brands, but why use it when color mixes can achieve the same effect?)  

TRANSPARENT WATERCOLORS, Steve Mitchell's M. Graham preferences 

Payne's gray (for cooling colors) (my research shows most Payne's gray is opaque)
sepia (for warming colors)
azo green
Indian yellow
red iron oxide
quinacridon red (pyrrol reds are also very transparent)
ultramarine blue
Prussian blue

So my first watercolors were M. Graham and nearly the same as the ones Steve had chosen for himself. He's a landscape artist while I like painting animals within landscapes, so different colors are therefore appealing to me. 

However, while I loved the luminosity and the great flow of the M. Graham, they don't travel well because of their high gooey honey base. Now I've branched out into mostly Daniel Smith, yeah, expensive, but I like their wide selection of transparent colors, and I'm experimenting a bit with a few of their Primatek earth colors. Fun indeed!

I've also chosen a few Winsor and Newton, as sometimes a W&N is more transparent than a semi-transparent DS. But, Steve, thanks for giving me a really good foundation in theory and the first steps in application knowledge. I can say that your passion has become my passion!  

Daniel Smith+ 31-color palette

So finally set up and painted out my professional watercolor palette. It's comprised of 31 Daniel Smith paints, several of which are the earthy primatek colors, 4 Winsor & Newtons, and 5 M Grahams. I'm trying to use up the M Grahams, lovely colors, but messy because of the gooey honey used in the formula. If I used my colors only in a studio, I would absolutely treasure my rich M Grahams, but the traveler has a messy paintbox because of the gooey paints, especially Pyrrol Scarlet, not a color anyone wants going all over their paintbox!

After I put together my colors and painted them out, my palette still had an empty lower left corner so added in the rich M Graham azo green (it's a bit less yellow than the W&N green gold already in the palette) and the three Turner paints: Alizarin Crimson (no one makes a color-fast AC so got a cheap color to test out what the rave on the color was about), copper (how absolutely lovely!) and clove (opaque but beautiful color no one else has). 

After painting 39 of the colors out (didn't include Buff Titanium as I can guess what the combinations would be), I realize I went a little heavier on earth tones than I intended, but in my defense my interest is animal painting and the colors I bought were mostly single pigment so capable of mixing with any other single pigment for "good" mixing qualities.

Daniel Smith 240-color Chart

Daniel Smith has an extensive selection of watercolors, and while I can look online to see the color charts of others, sometimes it's hard to tell about intensity and mixing qualities of certain colors or even about how it looks in comparison with colors in other brands I'm more familiar with, so I ordered the DS 240-color-dot cards to paint out the sample of watercolors for myself.

If you turn the above chart 90-degrees to the left,
the 4 groups of colors are exact representations of the 4 DS 240-color dot-cards. 

The blues, greens and earth tones got my closest attention as I'm most interested in making animal paintings. One color that I was really looking forward to testing out was Yavapai, a yellow-brown ochre-like color; I wanted to see how it compared with raw sienna and goethite, but from this chart and looking at online samples I'm thinking that Monte Amiata might be a better color choice as Yavapai seems a bit browner than what I'm looking for. However, still not sure as Yavapai was NOT included in the 240-color selection. Bit disappointed, but I did learn a LOT and made shifts in what colors I would and would not get in the future. 

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!