Choose a Color Scheme

One of the tasks in a watercolor class assignment this week includes selecting a ‘color scheme’. It seems like a simple task – thus the topic of Color Week 29.

Monet loved to use a limited palette. He achieved more luminescence by having to utilize more mixes rather than from a variety of colours. Typically he used just three colours, a warm and cool of each

These choices might replicate a warm/cool limited palette of Monet:

Lemon Yellow – Cool
New Gamboge – Warm
Pyrrol Scarlet – Warm
Alizarin Permanent – Cool
Ultramarine Blue – Warm
Cerulean Blue – Cool

Back to choosing a color scheme – there are so so many enticing watercolors for the palette. Winsor Newton offers 108, Daniel Smith 261 and it’s fun to select new colors for the palette, but a color scheme is limited!

Below are some examples of color schemes shown in sketches from classes I have taken over the past few years. Every instructor has a suggested palette with a limited selection of warm & cool colors, plus what I would call their ‘signature, go-to’ colors. From Stephanie Bower we learned to use Sap Green and Pyrrol Orange, Shari Blaukopf introduced me to Indanthrone Blue & Phthalo Green and Ian de Hoog’s birds eyes are enhanced by his very specific choices.