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isthisthingstillon

the pettiest bitch in the house.
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Beasts

2 min read

Keeping this shortish: A while back my prime wife @madnessism started a fun little collective over to the side called The Beasts of AI and I've been a part of it for a couple months. We're mostly twitter active, but because of the drama around twitter currently some of us are migrating some work over to DA to get new eyes on it. I didn't want the baggage of this account tied to it (and will not be active in any sense of the term apart from posting my work) so if you want to check out my stuff drop me a watch on @exquisitest. You can also check out some of our early-adopter comrades at @artistficially, @king0lightai and @L3VEL7 - and eventually we'll be setting up @thebeastsofai as a group to collect all our stuff in one space.


Check us out @ thebeastsofai on twitter too - we run some neat initiatives.


I haven't talked much about my life as an artist after my health issues in 2017, but I've had limited ability to create since then. This is why I'm embracing AI and I view it largely as a starting point that gets edited and refined a lot in post-process. I'm not interested in the debate as to whether AI is art or about the legalities - I have my own stance on the issue as informed by the technology and the law, and I'll share that with you if you really want to know but you aren't going to change my mind on any of it so.


Welp - time for me to log out again. Catch you in another four years. Stay devious.

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A Check-In

5 min read




I'm Not "Back"

So don't get excited. I just know this is a convenient way to broadcast an update to y'all on where life has led me. I'm still not around much, if at all. I do check my messages maybe once a week and pop on the chat network when I get a snow day at work. I'm creating, but it's not meant for y'all. :pringles:

So illness sucks. That's not up for debate. All types of illness suck. A cold sucks. Scrambled nerves suck. Depression sucks. Vague autoimmune diarrhea sucks. Abscessed molars suck. Herpes sucks. (Not crotchpox. The shingles. I'm less sexually active than a Buddhist nun.) Then it all gets better. Medication juggling is an ongoing battle and I'm trying to find a happy medium of being just healthy enough. And then shit starts hitting the fan in every direction, people start dying, you get a job, and it all goes to hell. And then it all gets better again. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

And then somewhere in the middle of it all I've found a pretty comfortable life through self-flagellation. I don't allow myself any luxury more luxurious than one pound of bacon or one bottle of prosecco a month. I don't deserve it. Clean eating, clean living, clean mental processes, clean house. I'm sure it'll all get fucked up come the summer - it would be unlike me to keep the stability for any amount of time lbr - but for now it's great. I'm working in my industry again, dipping my feet back into having a social life, living with a grandmother I didn't speak to for six years in the old family house that was vacant for so long, knitting shawls, playing euchre, thinking in French, going to church, reconnecting with my family, growing my own henna, getting two kittens at the end of the month.

Not dating, because no. It'll be a long fucking time before I do that again.

(Can any of you imagine me ever saying that and keeping to it at any point in my past? I can't. Yet here I am.)

There's a nagging sensation that right around the corner something's waiting to blast it all to hell. If anyone on this earth has some bad karmic debt it's me. But I guess until then I'll roll with it. I might not think I deserve to be happy, but I do deserve to continue.

And I just put my hair back to my old phoenix red.

Fuck's up with all y'all?


A Plath Excerpt

    Ash, ash—
    You poke and stir.
    Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——
    
    A cake of soap,   
    A wedding ring,   
    A gold filling.
    
    Herr God, Herr Lucifer   
    Beware
    Beware.
    
    Out of the ash
    I rise with my red hair   
    And I eat men like air.



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One Last Update

5 min read




Words?

So by now you've probably noticed I'm not around much. It happens.

My life has gravitated elsewhere. "Elsewhere" is this weird and wonderful place of reading tarot semi-professionally, growing okra, playing cards every Wednesday with my 78-year-old great aunt Annette over a bottle of moonshine, owning roughly half of a rapidly growing art-oriented web startup, and trying to find a local beer I don't hate since I've moved cross-country and they don't sell my brand here.

It isn't that I dislike DA. It isn't that my experiences here weren't important, or fun most of the time. The place just has a lot of memories, some good and some terrible, and logging in feels a bit like putting on a backpack full of cinder blocks and jumping in a lake. There are people here I miss, but there are also people here I'd rather never speak to again (you know who you are! :) )

I've also hit this weird place artistically where I know my past work was driven by emotions so extreme that they pulled me into the perfect headspace for creating meaningful work. Now I've felt those highs and lows and landed somewhere in the middle. Turns out the middle doesn't have that same level of visceral need for catharsis that the poles have. I am not creating, because I have no need to create; instead I'm experiencing, doing, and trying to find new paths to the same feelings. Those paths, to date, have not involved a camera or a pen. They've involved volunteering for the church, meditating on tree limbs beside creeks in the forest, finding the perfect recipe for kimchi, re-learning how to smile and laugh and frown and cry in the pace of everyday living.

Oh, and I vape now, because cigarettes are like $19 a pack here because God must fucking hate me.

So I might be back, in some capacity, to some degree of regularity, some day. I'm not ruling out the possibility that art won't seize me and I won't feel the need to resurface with a vengeance the next time I sit on the wrong dick or whatever. That day's not today, though. Even though I miss you this place isn't my home anymore. And I'm not entirely gone - you can still find me on the chat network in #ThumbHub and :#cabalists: once in a while.

I'm also no longer a volunteer and haven't been for like two months or more now, so while I do appreciate the tags to close your forum shitposts, they can stop any fucking time, y'all. :)

Here, have a feature for old time's sake:

Browse By Newest, vFINAL


.... No. You know what? Newest photography was literally a picture of a ballsack and 14 pictures of Taylor Swift. Here, have some actual curated content. You all deserve better from me than that actual fecal matter. If I can leave you with one message, it is to remember: Not all art is good art, not all of what you see is art, and shit is shit, period. If anyone tries to tell you otherwise, sing the chorus of "Beds Are Burning" and kick them in the fucking taint. For the sake of culture.


Layne by DanOstergren
Summer game by Elko-Photography

Closer by SebastienTabuteaud

Peace, bitches.

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Trad Basics Week


Re-Introduction


In the previous installment, Choosing Paints, Part I: Fat and ... Translucent?, we discussed picking your first paint, monochromatic painting and the two-colour and Zorn palettes. For 3300 words. And you thought that was enough learning. :evillaugh:


What we're trying to prevent: Bad life choices, and unsaleable art that leads to the ramen diet.

Today we're going to go over the basic palette of six colours as a launching point for artistic success. These tips apply to all painterly media - oils, acrylics, watercolours, gouache, pastel, you name it and it fits. Let's start with the dry stuff:


The Six Colour Palette


Like in the previous article, assume your palette includes at least one white (paint in oils/acryls/gouache/encaustic/cat sacrifice; paper in watercolours) and possibly a black that don't count toward your colour total. A six-colour palette includes a warm and cool pigment for each primary colour - red, blue and yellow. This mix lets you blend a wide range of colours more or less approximating the full spectrum, though you may have to rely a bit more on black depending on which specific pigments you choose. (Or you can buck the black and use a complimentary two-colour mix or a bit of all three primaries instead of a tube black, if you're feeling extra artistic - this in theory will create more harmony between the tones of your painting, but might give you some unpredictable results until you're used to your tube colours.)


Oh the possibilities.

Warm versus Cool

These terms are ones I've been throwing around a lot, so here's a quick reference:
     :bulletred: Cool Reds - reds with a bit of blue or violet skew, like crimsons; pinks read as cool reds
     :bulletyellow: Cool Yellows - yellow with a bit of a blue or green skew, like lemon yellows; light neutral yellows usually read cool, but there are some exceptions
     :bulletblue: Cool Blues - blues that skew toward green, like turquoise; light neutral blues often read cool too
     :bulletred: Warm Reds - reds leaning on the orange side, like scarlets; most of the "red" reds read warm, and some warm oranges can pass for really warm reds
     :bulletyellow: Warm Yellows - yellows tending toward hints of orange or brown, like golds; the darker yellows almost invariably read warm, except for dark lemons
     :bulletblue: Warm Blues - blues that aren't green, like indigo; almost all neutral blues look warm in mass tone

A Preliminary Note On Mixing Colours

You never put a warm yellow with a cool blue to make vibrant green: it makes dull baby diarrhea. This is because as you get closer to mixing complimentary colours, your result gets further from the pure secondary colour and closer to neutral grey. In practice this makes mud on your canvas or paper - a washed-out, not-quite-brown, not-quite-grey shade of the pure secondary colour you're going for. It's a useful tool when you're trying to tone down a mix though - if you have a vibrant green, let's say a phthalo turquoise in a hansa yellow, and add a little deep red it will subdue that green to a more natural tone. It's because of this that the six colour palette includes warm and cool tones of each primary - to allow mixing either vibrant, pure secondaries or more subdued tertiaries.

Warm Blue

The first colour we'll pick in a six-colour palette is your warmer blue - the blue that skews a bit more neutral or even indigo. Your typical choice for a warm blue in a traditional palette is a (French) ultramarine, PB29; it is a moderately tinting, semi-transparent and quite neutral blue that has a bit of an iridescent sheen to it if used in thin glazes in oils. It also flocculates in watercolour, which basically means it granulates in weird rod-like clumps, filling the gaps of rough paper when it's diluted enough.


Gif unrelated.

Other options include a non-green-shade phthalo blue PB15, which is higher-tint and more transparent; PB60 indanthrone which is a synthetic warm blue that skews a bit more purple than ultramarine but otherwise behaves similarly with a slightly higher tint factor; PB66 geniune indigo, the traditional denim colour, which is low-tint and isn't very lightfast but gives a nice richness to the palette (check the tube if you buy indigo paint because a lot of them use a phthalo mix with slightly different properties and a cooler tone); or PB74 cobalt zinc silicate if you want to use something that's much more opaque but a bit more expensive.

Cool Blue

The typical cool blue in an artist's palette is PB28 cobalt, a toxic heavy metal pigment that is quite expensive, opaque, moderate in tint strength, and a bit on the neutral side of the cool spectrum. For landscapes and other applications where you may want a less vivid blue the go-to is PB29 cerulean, another cobalt pigment that's lower tint, much lighter, and a bit less opaque; it also granulates in watercolours. PB36 cobalt turquoise is also an option and is especially useful if you'll be mixing a lot of greens; it's about as semi-opaque as cerulean, but doesn't granulate in watercolours. Cobalt pigments are expensive, and cerulean is among the most expensive you'll find in most lines.


Cobalt is the Honey Boo Boo of pigments.

If you want something more intense, PB27 prussian blue is a cool super-high-tint option with a stronger green skew, as are the PB15 phthalo green shades and PB16 phthalo turquoise. For something a bit more manageable with a touch of iridescence I've always liked PG19 viridian, a shiny teal pigment that is transparent and if diluted enough will granulate in watercolours; it isn't cheap but it's a fun pigment to play with if you're tired of the old standards in the cool blue slot. And if you want something that flocculates like an ultramarine but goes on a bit more opaque and lower-tint, PB33 manganese is a viable option if you can find it - it's an uncommon pigment now and tends to be expensive, but can give a great texture especially to water.


The importance of checking pigments - only one of these is actual manganese.

Cool Yellow

The standard cool yellow in the six colour system is actually more of a neutral yellow, and you'll often find artists using a PY35/37 cadmium yellow or PY41 naples yellow in this role, depending if they want a brighter or duller yellow. Both are opaque, both are fairly expensive, and naples yellow skews toward a fleshy tone whereas cadmium has a more pure lemony colour. In modern practice you may prefer the hansa yellow family, especially PY3 hansa lemon, if you want something that isn't going to break the bank; the hansas are high-tinting, but are semi-transparent so keep that in mind if you're switching from a cadmium.

Other options that could serve you well in the opaque group are PY154 benzamidazolone, a synthetic lemon yellow similar to hansa but opaque; PY30 turner's lead, a subdued yellow similar to naples but not quite as fleshy; or PY53 nickel-antimony lemon, a favourite of mine in watercolours since its opacity is based largely on how dilute it is - going from fully opaque to semi-transparent as you add the tiniest bits of water. If you want a transparent cool yellow you are severely limited and pretty much have to use either hansa lemon or PY31 barium lemon, an older synthetic that is more transparent but lower-tint. Or you can come out of left field and use PY192 green gold, a much greener yellow (closer to a yellow-skewed green, really) that's subdued and granulates in watercolour.


Oh, transparent yellow, how you're a jerk.

Warm Yellow

For a warm yellow you'll most often use PY43 ochre, an opaque earth pigment; PY42 gold ochre is an equally viable option, giving an even warmer tone and slightly less opacity. PY153 new gamboge is a similar pigment with similar properties but higher tint strength and retaining more of a true yellow tone when diluted or mixed with white, whereas the ochres tend to wash out a bit; ochres are also less expensive in most lines. 

PY1 hansa yellow
 is a possibility if you want something semitransparent with high tint power, but be warned it isn't lightfast; if you want a lightfast transparent warm yellow (mouthful much?) you're limited to PY40 aureolin, which has slightly lower tint power than hansa. 


You can also use a yellow-skewed orange if you're feeling really risqué. Or raw umber.

Cool Red

The warm red is often the only true red on a palette - your cool red will often be replaced by a brown earth! In those situations you might use any of the PBr7 browns or PR101/102 reds - English red, Venetian red, burnt umber, burnt sienna or raw sienna as a cool red (raw umber reading more as a yellow than a red). All these pigments are opaque and vary in their tinting strength, and they're all fairly inexpensive.

If you decide to try a true red for your cool red, historically you would have used PR83 alizarin - a super high tint very intense transparent crimson pigment - but it's terribly fugitive so it's rarely even available now. Instead, PR264 pyrrole rubine or PR149 perylene tend to be used, with similar properties but less tinting power and much better lightfastness. There are also some interesting pink options that read as a cool red but offer a subdued overall feel in your work, like NR9 rose madder (a natural plant lake that's only used in watercolour and isn't lightfast but has a very earthy feel and smells amazing) or PR259 ultramarine pink (which behaves exactly like any other ultramarine pigment - iridescent in thin oil glazes, flocculating in watercolours, and semitransparent). You could even pull in one of the fugitive but intense pink dye pigments, like PR122 quinacridone magenta or PR173 fluorescent rhodamine and make the colours really pop!


SO BRIGHT.

Warm Red

That vermillion we talked about so much in the last article? That's warm red - pretty much any of the substitutions I listed will work too, so let's review:
Good modern substitutes for vermillion include PR108 cadmium red (in a deeper, warmer shade if you can find it) which is also highly toxic, opaque and expensive but won't react weirdly with flake white; PR254 pyrrole red which is a high-tint synthetic but a bit cooler in tone than true vermillion; or PR188 naphthol scarlet, which is warm like a true vermillion but a bit more transparent so you may find you use more in your tints.

Black

In the previous article we discussed - briefly - that ivory black can read as a cool blue in the Zorn palette. On its own, however, PBk9 ivory black is warm-neutral. It's the juxtaposition of ivory black against vermillions and ochres that makes it look like the "cool" element of the image. PBk6 carbon black is a pure neutral, PBk7 lamp black is warmer, PBk8 vine black is neutral-cold and PBk11 mars black is the coldest; all these black pigments are made from carbon of various sources (burned petroleum products, burned bone, burned wood and straight-up graphite), are semi-opaque, moderately tinting and lightfast. And kind of boring wait did I actually just type that.


Sorry, I just don't really use them so I'm biased.

There really are few options for black that aren't carbons, but PBk28 spinel black is becoming a favourite of mine in oils - it behaves like an ultramarine, iridescent in thin glazes and semi-transparent, lending itself well to sfumato work. It's made from the same substance as found in emeralds, too, which is kind of fun?


... And Beyond!


Outside of these pigment families, most of what you see in tube colour are "novelty" pigments - like PR233 potter's pink, a granulating watercolour that is great for skin tones and textures, or PBk31 perylene green, a counterintuitively named black pigment that tints to a green-brown appropriate for accenting foliage. These pigments are great for specific uses, but finding those uses is often a mix of experimentation and prayer. There are thousands of numbered pigments and even more pigment blends available as tube colour and the sky's the limit for adding to the basic palette. Just remember, the more pigments you add, the less "organic" the piece will generally feel and the more muddy tones you risk making!


Adding random dioxazine violet to a painting that so far has only contained brown earths and alizarin will make you have all the fashion sense of Patsy tho.


Discussion

Do you have a specific palette - or any specific pigments - you just can't live without? Let us know in the comments!


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Trad Basics Week


Introduction


When learning how to paint traditionally, most people pick their colours two ways: buying a kit of basic colours, and/or buying random tubes that look like they might resemble the colours in the finished piece the person is envisioning. Unfortunately a lot of beginners don't have a teacher standing over their shoulders advising them which tube of red or white is going to be most useful in the long-run, or how that one $12 tube will last fifteen times longer than the $4.75 "student grade" tube beside it - and be easier to work with.


Student-grade cobalt violet hue is not amused with my elitism.

In this article we're going to examine the basic painterly palettes at the pigment level instead of the common name, and how to piece these palettes together with tube colour for the lowest cost and best result. We're also going to review some basic pigment properties and how they can impact your colour choices. While I will mainly be covering oils and watercolours, most of the basic rules - transparencies, temperatures, tinting power, lightfastness - apply to acrylics, oil pastels, regular pastels and encaustic media as well. Now buckle in, because this is going to be a long one.

... Tube Colour? What?


Tube or pan colour is what you're probably calling "paint" right now - it's the concentrated mixture of pigment(s), binders and media that they sell in a tube or pan. (In this article I'll be referring to both tube colour and pan colour as tube colour in the general, just for ease of writing.) Paint, conversely, is what you put on your canvas - tube colour that's been tinted into white, mixed, diluted, dissolved in media, prayed over by your grandmother, or sometimes even applied straight from the tube. A typical oil tube colour is pigment suspended in linseed oil, whereas a typical watercolour is pigment blended into gum arabic solution. Watercolour pan colour is a mixture of pigment and gum arabic that's been prepared dry.

When you pick up a tube colour you will usually see two cryptic symbols - a square that's either white, black, or half white and half black and either 1-3 stars or a Roman numeral between I and IV.


On this example they're right below the colour name; this is true of Holbein, Grumbacher and Old Holland too last I checked. Other brands might put them on the back of the label, like Winsor-Newton does.

Opacity


The square represents the opacity of the pigment(s) in the tube - if the square is black, the pigment is opaque and will hide anything it's painted over, even in thin glazes; if the square is white, it's transparent and won't hide anything, even as straight tube colour. A square that's half black and half white is semi-opaque, and one that's white with a black line through it is semi-transparent. We will discuss opacity in more depth later in the article.


In this example, cadmium scarlet is opaque and perylene scarlet is transparent; scarlet lake is semi-transparent, and would skew to semi-opaque if it was less diluted.

Lightfastness


The stars or Roman numeral represent lightfastness - how likely a pigment is to fade over time if exposed to light. More stars or a lower numeral mean the paint is more lightfast, or has better staying power. You might think that means it makes the most sense to always buy super-lightfast pigment, but for some colours - especially transparent reds/yellows, most pinks, almost all purples, metallics and fluorescent dye-based colours - the most intense pigments are fugitive (not lightfast); these pigments have their place in illustration, or in originals that will be scanned and sold as prints, but you'll want to avoid them for mantelpiece portraits or other high-value wall hung works that you don't want to look wrong in a decade. You can also use lightfast pigments if you are framing the painting with glass since UV-glazing will prevent most of the fading you would otherwise get.


The cerulean-looking blue here is EXTREMELY fugitive; all the others are lightfast.

Pigment Numbers


You'll also see one other thing you want to take note of on the tube: the pigment number. Any tube colour worth using will list every pigment it contains, and often artist-series paints only contain one pigment (like Holbein's vermillion oils, which contain only PR106 Vermillion). The fewer pigments you use, the less muddy your mixed paint will be.  Some single pigments, especially phthalos and a few of the natural pigments and their synthetics, are downright cheap, so if you're starting out and want a brown earth or a titanium white or an ultramarine blue, those ones are usually safe with consistent properties across any line - though the ultramarine might have some phthalo pigments added to it to increase the intensity a bit. As a general rule, artist-grade tube and pan colours have more concentrated pigments while student-grade ones are more dilute.

If you see a tube of something ridiculously expensive like cadmium lemon for the same price as yellow ochre, though? Well, usually if a tube has the same name as a pigment it contains just that pigment, but if it has "hue" at the end it probably is a single-pigment synthetic lookalike of lower value or a blend of pigments, and may have different properties than the pure pigment wouldSome pigments are very expensive or highly toxic so student-grade and lower-cost artist grade tube colour versions are "hues". For example, true vermillion from above, which we established is PR106, is over $40/tube, toxic, and turns black if exposed to lead so it's fallen out of fashion. Most "vermillion hue" paints contain a naphthol pigment PR188, which is similar in colour to a true vermillion, non-toxic, resists the discoloration that vermillion gets, but is significantly less opaque than the real thing. 


Sorry for the driest two paragraphs ever but you just learned something useful dammit.

For this article we will use a mix of pigment numbers and common names for convenience when you're shopping. When in doubt, check the pigment code - it's the only way to get mostly consistent results across brands and grades.

Now, onto the first colour on the list:

White


Warning:
White paint has no place in watercolour. If you want to follow acrylic or oil paint mixing advice with white in watercolours, you're now using gouache instead of "true" watercolour and might as well be using a chalk pastel. When painting with watercolours, you tint by adding water. Your paper acts as your white in the mix; you just have to thin your tube colour to make it lighter. If you really need some pure white as a final touch in a watercolour piece, use white acrylic paint, acrylic ink, or a white gel pen - if you use white tube colour it's going to blend into the layer beneath it and give your piece that typical chalky gouache look you're probably avoiding if you aren't intentionally using gouache.

Fat Over Lean

It's literally impossible to discuss the differences in white oil colours without touching on fat over lean - the concept of using faster-drying paints on the lower layers of a painting and slower-drying paints on the higher layers. If you ignore this rule your top layers will crack as they dry over the still-wet lower layers; basically, the top film stabilizes first, hardens, then the bottom film constricts and laughs its ass off at the top layer's new wrinkles since the substrate that hard top layer was stuck to is now shifting in every direction.


Remember, fat describes the paint, not the painter.

Most artists use varying media concentrations to get their fat-over-lean mixing right, diluting their bottom layer with a 2:1 or even 3:1 mix of mineral spirits to linseed oil, 1:1 mix for the middle layers, and 1:2, straight linseed, or a thicker linseed oil called "stand oil" for their top glazes. This is how fat over lean gets its name: the "fat" oil dries more slowly than the "lean" mineral spirit. The principle of fat over lean colours the choice of which white pigment to use at which stage of an oil painting too - one pigment dries much more quickly than the other two common pigments.

Titanium and Zinc (Chinese) Whites: PW6 and PW4

Titanium and zinc are the two "basic" whites in oil colour, with titanium being the standard white across most other media - gouache being the exception, where Chinese white is the typical opacity-inducer. Both are fairly slow drying neutral whites; titanium has a bit more neutral of a colour temperature and zinc has more of a warm skew in linseed oil, though sometimes skewing to cool if it's diluted in non-linseed oils or mineral spirits. Titanium is fully opaque and zinc is slightly semi-opaque, and zinc dries a tiny bit more slowly than titanium. Zinc is also a bit softer and butter-y-er than titanium as a tube colour, the latter feeling a bit like chalk when you work with it, even in "soft" formulations like Grumbacher's soft mixing white.


Titanium is also significantly cheaper than zinc and comes in gigantic tubes, so it's the most used white, even though zinc is inherently better. Zinc is the Biggie Shorty of white tube colour.

Lead (Flake/Cremnitz) White: PW1

Lead white isn't available everywhere, and is highly toxic since it's obviously lead - but it has a place in the oil arsenal since it is the fastest-drying white, drying in half to a quarter of the time it takes for zinc to dry. Lead white is a common go-to for artists for underpainting, where you want your base layer to dry quickly before you glaze over it with the thinner zincs or titaniums. It's also a bit more flexible when dried, unlike the stiffer zinc and especially titanium. Lead is super lightfast like the other common whites, and has a neutral-cool temperature and slightly iridescent sheen. Cremnitz whites are suspended in safflower instead of linseed oil and have a cooler hue but dry more slowly, while flake (sometimes called foundation or underpainting) whites are suspended in linseed so dry more quickly but tend to yellow over time when exposed to light - not a huge concern if you're going to glaze over it, but it may be an issue if you're painting a piece alla prima.

One-Colour Palettes


When people discuss a limited palette by the number of colours, they usually state "x colours" where it's implied you're using that number in addition to one or more whites. For a one-colour palette, you're picking a pigment and using it in tints, or white dilutions. For watercolours this just means adding water to your paint, but for oils it means adding white tube colour.

Underpainting

The standard classic one-colour palette isn't used for finished pieces, but instead for the base layer of a painting: PG23 terre verte, a colour usually marketed either by that name or by its English translation, "Green Earth". It's a fast-drying, transparent, lightfast earthy greyish-green pigment with low tinting strength (which means it takes very little white to brighten it) that was historically made from actual soil but is now more often produced synthetically. Terre verte is neutral enough in hue that it makes a good ground for skin tones as a foundation to glaze over with yellows and reds. In oils it's usually mixed with a PW1 lead white, and in watercolours it's used straight, diluted in water. Terre verte also has a fun property in watercolours: it granulates, meaning on a rougher paper the pigment will settle out of the paint and fill the little dents in the fibre. Here's a picture to show you what that looks like:



And here's a picture to show you how that makes me feel:



Using a brown earth pigment like an umber or sienna will give you similar effects but a different basic colour, and the browns tend to have slower drying times, lower transparency and much higher tint strengths than terre verte. They will also inherently make your skin tones skew to Snooki orange, so throw some blue glazes in there somewhere for your own sanity. We will discuss browns in the next segment of this article on two-colour palettes.

Working in Monochrome

Another option for a one-colour palette is black in white, which we'll discuss a bit later since it's a tricky group of pigments to master. This combination is more often used for pieces that are going to be black and white from beginning to end, since blacks can skew colours a lot when glazed over. Of course, the sky's the limit for monochrome paintings, so any pigment can be used, really - experiment and see if you find one you particularly like! You may find high-tint pigments (I'll highlight them as I mention them later in the article) to be hard to work with in monochrome, though - they take a lot of white and tend to dry a lot more slowly than the low-tint alternatives.


Make this your attitude toward picking pigments for a one-colour palette.


The Two-Colour Limited Palette


For two-colour palettes, you can safely assume that at least white is included without being one of the two colours (white paint in oils, white paper in watercolours); we'll also say black or grey doesn't count for the purposes of this article, because I want to include Zorn here as a bridge to the second part of this series. More on that later.

The Basic Two-Colour Palette

Your most basic two-colour palette is any two colours that, when mixed, give you a more or less true black. This means we're going to lean heavily on complementary colours - colours directly opposite each other on the colour wheel like blues with browns, greens with reds, yellows with purples.



You'll notice that in the above image, the truest black is about a 60/40 mix of a phthalo green (I'm assuming PG7 but don't quote me on that) with a cadmium red PR108. This is because both are high tint pigments, a property you want if you're trying to get a true black. The reason the split is uneven is because phthalo pigments are transparent, so it takes a bit more of it to fully "hide" the super-rich opaque cadmium - it's sort of a counterintuitive property, since phthalo pigments are much higher tinting in white than cadmiums. This is also why you may need to adjust the ratios when you add white to the mix if you want a neutral tone.

In the row beneath, cerulean blue PB35 is a very-low-tint blue, cadmium orange is a low-tint orange, and while you get a nice neutral grey it's not nearly dark enough for the most intense shadows. When working with two colours, it's ideal to go for high tints; you can always add white to get your mid-greys.

Brown and Blue

The classical two-colour palette is a warm brown with a neutral blue: PR102 or PBr7 Burnt Sienna with PB29 Ultramarine. These are two pigments made synthetically now but historically harvested from nature - soil for the former, lapis lazuli for the latter - and they've been used since the ancient Egyptian period at least. They're also two of the cheapest pigments, which is a big deal when you're playing. By mixing them about half-and-half you get neutral black and along the way you can get a range of blues, browns and greys:



You can swap out the burnt sienna for an (also PBr7) raw sienna or burnt umber for a cooler or warmer, respectively, palette; or you can play around with some novelty browns like NBr9 sepia ink or PBr11 magnesium brown if you want to try lowering or raising, respectively, the transparency of the final mix, but both of those pigments are going to cost you a lot more than a brown earth.

Burning Bridges by Face-Reality
An example from DA of brown with blue - note the really dynamic shadows you can create with this combination.

If you want to test a different blue, PB60 indanthrone is a good choice for substituting ultramarine in terms of shade and transparency, but has a higher tint strength so you'll not need as much of it; you can try PB27 prussian blue for a cooler gradient, or PB15:1 pthalo blue red shade for a warmer one, and both of these are high-tinting too.


Sepia ink and natural indigo are Nene's mix of choice for a two-colour palette because she just absolutely loves hemorrhaging money.

Zorn: Where Black Is Blue

Anders Zorn was a portly Swedish fellow who is viewed as one of the better portraitists of the turn of the 20th century, and his trick for realistic skin tones was using a limited palette based on the primary colours of red, yellow and blue - specifically PY43 ochre, PBk9 ivory black and PR105 vermillion with PW1 flake white.

<da:thumb id="572416427"/> Woman 17-09-03 by keeny Subway 2 Gouache Dec 2016 by grobles63 After the Swim -Zorn Palette- by Zirngibl Jason Aaron Baca ZORN PALETTE mostly done by tuolumney
Some works from DA using Zorn or modified Zorn palettes</suv>

In this palette of natural opaque colours the yellow and red are both quite warm in shade, with a cool-neutral white and a cool black that tints to a deep blue-grey in white. He would often add one "novelty" pigment to each painting for an accent colour, but we're not going to cover those quite yet.


Like the tiny little bit of vermillion in the tie on this one.

If you want to pull off a modern Zorn, you'll want to make a couple minor changes. First, vermillion and flake white are actually really bad together and cause weird darkening of the colours over time; flake's also not widely available anymore, so your best bet is either a zinc or titanium depending on your painting style. (Or, use the palette without the white if you're painting watercolours.)

You'll also have a hard time finding vermillion, and it's now super expensive, among the most expensive pigments. It's only made by certain companies and the prices are sky-high - I paid about $50 Canadian last year for a small tube of Holbein's vermillion. Vermillion is also one of the most toxic pigments, so if you use it it's a good idea to not touch or eat your paint. 


Obligatory Disclaimer: Project Educate takes no accountability for the consequences of you eating paint after reading the above line.

Good modern substitutes for vermillion include PR108 cadmium red (in a deeper, warmer shade if you can find it) which is also highly toxic, opaque and expensive but won't react weirdly with flake white; PR254 pyrrole red which is a high-tint synthetic but a bit cooler in tone than true vermillion; or PR188 naphthol scarlet, which is warm like a true vermillion but a bit more transparent so you may find you use more in your tints (good thing it and pyrrole are about four times cheaper than vermillion and three times cheaper than cadmium!).


The Zorn palette on a canvas will not make you inherently look painterly like Anders, sorry.


Tune In Tomorrow...


... For more discussion about pigments and how to build a comprehensive six-colour palette!


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