How to Set Up Your Pallet for Watercolors

Video Transcript

Hi! I’m John Junger. I do the paintings that we’re going to be talking about, the watercolors. I’m here representing expertvillage.com. Setting up your pallet can be another segment on how you’re working; having the colors function well for you when you go to take them out of the pallet and put them onto the paper. As you can see from the way I have my pallet laid out here, I have the blues in one segment, the yellows and oranges going to the reds, and the reds to the violets and purples. My darkest color is a sepia, which is in that corner, browns to green. There are not to many greens because ala prima greens generally are kind of harsh, and I like to mix my own greens using yellows, blues, browns, and so forth, which are more like nature reflecting the color in a better spectrum, in my opinion. You get into some of the greens, and they’re very chromatic like that one, and they’re very staining color. I try to steer away from that unless I particularly need that for ever green brushes, or something like that. Emerald green, it’s a nice friendly color, but it’s got some white in it, so you have to be careful how much of that, you don’t want it opaque looking. I don’t want it opaque looking watercolor. If you look at the end of my pallet, because my memory is so short, I’ve labeled each one with a marker, so that when I’m out on the field, and I look down and see that something is low. I might be to visible in the bright sun as to which one it is, and if I put the wrong thing in the wrong well, I’ll know it pretty soon. But then, you have to get it out of there somehow. The way I have my pallet it’s pane, grey, sepia, burnt sienna, meridian. Meridian is a very nice color; it goes well with a lot of things. Now, this is windsor blue. I have 3 blues, and as you can see the values on each one are different, and the shades are different. This has more transparency. The alterie is little more opaque, and the cobalt is kind of in between, but each one has a different value on the chromatic scale.

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