the Oil and Encaustic Pallette
May 20, 2009
I suspect that every artist has his or her favorite pigments and colors. It is necessary to find your own. It can be quite challenging at first to sort one’s way through the huge selection of colors available at any art supply store. Experience is the best guide. But that’s hard when you don’t have it.
Here’s what I use:
- Two yellows (a cool and a warm one, like citron yellow and cadmium yellow medium)
- Two reds (a cool and a warm one, like alizarin crimson and cadmium red medium)
- Two blues (a cool and a warm one, like thalo blue and ultramarine blue)
- Viridian (a pure green)
- Terre Verte (an earth green)
- Sienna (burnt and raw)
- Umber (burnt and raw)
- Mars Red
- Yellow Ochre
- Two whites (Lead white and Titanium)
- Two grays (Payne’s, and Warm Gray)
My thinking is that from these basic colors I can mix just about any thing I need while maintaining a clear idea of how I got there. In addition, the spectral purity of a color can best be appreciated by employing it directly out of the tube, unmixed. Therefore, one can try to achieve certain ‘mixed’ colors through translucent layers of paint, rather than mixing on the pallette. Doing this means becoming familiar with the characteristics of pigments themselves (opacity, translucency and tinting power). It also can mean using the translucency effects of the medium of oil or wax itself to create rich vibrant colors, that resonate like a sunset.
