A Primary Color Triad for Beginning Watercolor Artists #primarycolors #watercolor #mixingcolors

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[SomethingImpromptu]

If you’re sticking with just 3 primary colors, I think which ones you should use depends heavily on what kinds of things you’re going to be painting… Because a 3 color palette is actually pretty restrictive in terms of the range of colors you can mix… For example, if you choose a warm yellow like a cadmium yellow deep or Indian yellow, that could be great for a realistic landscape… It will allow you to create extremely vibrant oranges (especially mixed with a warm red, like cadmium or pyrrol scarlet)… But the warmer you go with your yellow, the more you’re also cutting off the most vibrant & brightest green end of the spectrum, which requires a cool yellow. If you choose a warm red in order to mix those brilliant oranges, that’s great… But the warmer your red is, the more you’re cutting off the most saturated, high chroma purples, which require a cool red/magenta/rose color to mix from primaries. Again, if you’re painting landscapes, that might be fine— maybe you’ll only ever need some moodier, more dull purples, for a moody sunset sky, & will have no need of the most saturated purples… Whereas, if you’re painting floral paintings, maybe you do need high chroma purples for violets or irises or whatever. So it’s worth really thinking about the subjects you’ll be painting & the techniques you intend to employ when planning a limited palette. Also, with so few pigments at your disposal, you need to be intentional about whether you want to choose all transparent pigments, all opaque pigments, all semi-, or some tactically selected combination thereof.

Personally, I think that, if you can afford to, it’s very much worthwhile (especially if you’ll be painting a wide variety of subjects) to go with a split primary palette. With one warm & one cool red, one warm & cool yellow, & one warm & one cool blue, you significantly expand the spectra of colors you’ll be able to paint— giving yourself the options needed to achieve pretty much the full range of saturation in any direction, from neutral greys, beiges, & browns, to the most intense purples, oranges, & greens. You still have to be selective about transparency vs opacity, because you’d rapidly have to expand to a LOT of paints to cover every combination of opacities for every split primary… A simple split primary palette of six well-selected paints will take you a LONG way.

[aDricalua]

I would like to sugest you a videoa bout how paint metal in not metallic color, i try and just look I used paynes gray don't look a silver gray metal, the color looked wrong