Premixed Palette

Alewives on blue, 5.5"x12.5" oil on studio canvas

Wicker, 8"x8" oil on board

These paintings were done using a premixed palette.  Now we artists have all heard about this.  Using a limited palette of primary colors, mix the best secondary colors, then add white to make a value string for each.  The idea is to have all your colors ready to use so you can paint freely without pausing to mix colors.  This is supposed to enhance the harmony of colors in your painting and help you focus on color choice  while painting.

In this case I used Cadmium Yellow Medium, Cadmium Scarlet Red, and Ultramarine Blue for my primary colors.  These made a nice orange, nice green, and a greyed purple.  ( At this point you could go on to make tertiary colors - yellow orange, red-orange, yellow green, blue green, red violet, blue violet.)  I took the secondarys and the primarys and made value strings of each.  For the first painting this worked fine.  For the second I also added a few darks (yellow, orange, red, and green) by adding some of the purple to them.  the pile of paint at the far right of the palette is the scrapings of any and all the colors as I painted, often called a mother color or mud.  A mother color is used to add to any color on your palette to neutralize it, and mud is a gray that some artists use for the same purpose, while others strive to keep it completely from their paintings.

I found that using this palette did let me paint more freely.  I wasn't constantly pausing to mix color and loosing my direction in the paint process.  I did use the open space at the bottom of the palette to alter colors a bit by mixing if I still wanted too.  (This was where the scrapings came from that i made mud with.)  The painting of the fish was done much more playfully- I could experiment with pattern, rather than worry if the colors were correct.  And the painting of the two wicker chairs sort of painted itself.  Both color and value just fell into place.  I found as I used the value strings to make shapes in the chairs, I was able to get some truly great grayed areas that were much more lively than if I had mixed the grays for those passages.

I was having so much success with this that I saved the palette so I can show it to my class at the Port Washington Senior center.  So I spread out the piles of paint and I left this paint palette outside overnite at our camper to dry.  What I surprise I was in for.  In the detail of the palette you can see tiny footprints of some visitor during the night!