Colours of your own : choosing a starter pack
An artist ready to test gouache as a new media asked me my thoughts about starter packs.
If you want to start gouache for the love of the paint, you don’t need to be an artist or even a professional artist. Do enjoy the wonderful textures and colors, don’t get bluffed by what very skilled artists do, just give it a try.
Here’s my 2 pennies on how to start while really having fun. No stupid old fashion century old rules. I will share here my knowledge about paints, pigments, and most of all, pretty colours!
There’s two approches in startingwith a new paint media. :
1.Create your own set of primary colours
Primary colours, if necessary, are very frustrating pure. ©delphine Doreau 2020
The term “primary” is a bit blurry. Basically, you were probably taught about mixing pure blue, pure red, pure yellow, as a basis for most secondary and tertiary colours. The bad news is, paints are made of pigments. There is no pure blue or any pure colour pigment. Phthalo blue is a bit green, Ultramarine a bit warm, cadmium red a bit orange, etc. So if you really want to stick to this antiquated notion of primaries ( I already discussed it here) and mix your colours like a printer ( why not if you dig it), you’ll have to buy one of those primary sets. The primary blue will probably be a mix of this and that, as the other colours, or they will be made of some pigment that have little weight in art history , like Quinopthalone Yellow.
The professional painters I know, from abstract to realistic, don’t use those sets. There must be a reason. Let’s take a look.
Painter before us, for sometimes millenaries, were using pigments. Natural iron oxides ( rust) gave us lovely reds and oranges and ochres. The first blue in painting was ultramarine, followed by Prussian blue. If I wanted to play by the rules like an old scholar, I’d put asside any theory of colours, and go back to the real base of paint, what it’s made of : pigments.
I would by as many monopigment paints as I could. Colors won’t muddy so much when mixed, and I would learn how paints and mixes really work. It’s chemistry before light or vision, and it often comes with a few surprises. Phtalo and iron oxides make a lovely palette of teals, would you have guessed that?
So, you could start with monopigments. Something like ultramarine, phtalo, cobalt, cadmiums, raw sienna, burnt sienna, burt umber, etc. You could even try pigments as they appeared in history, from earths to magentas, for a little fun. You would have real “primary” colours. After all, primary means “first”, and pigment comes first in paints.
or you could:
2.Create a set to recreate your own world of colours:
a palette of your own.
©Delphine Doreau 2020
You should enjoy the fact that we live in a world of colours. Colours with names. Colours we live with everyday, beyond the colour box. There’s no exact colour paints really, or very little, for the colours of our lives, the real ones. This past months, we are loving dusty pinks, dove greys, lovely saturated burgundies, a touch of saffron here and there, mustard yellows, greyish dark blues, and verdigris.
You won’t find a paintbox with exactly our favorite colours. ( it should be a thing. If you make paints feel free to contact me)
©Delphine Doreau 2020
What I suggest, is to first buy the colours that will match some favourites : venetian red, prussian blue, Payne’s grey, ash green, rose madder, potter’s pink …and a big, very big tube of white.
Then I would have fun making the others by mixing other colours. I mix my colours in watercolour pans with a droplet of glycerin to be able to rewet them.
Cadmium red and the weirdly named flesh* make a wonderful coral.
Ocher and cadmium yellow make a lovely mustard, and more yellow and a touch of venetian red will go lovingly saffron.
Olive green and lavender give a whole palette of pretty greys, doves, verdigris and mauves : it’s quite enchanting.
Make some teals with cyprus green, cobalt blue, Cobalt turquoise light and magenta. Make colours that sing your own song.
Play with colours as they come into your life. Make colours you can name because they are part of your life : emerald, navy, dusty rose, dove grey.
You’ll have to start with a restricted palette. But it might be a good thing, you’ll try some new mixes, make illustrations and paintings in your own taste, get comfortable. It might even be a bit difficult to expand your palette after a while. You’ll be happy as a lark, and that why you wanted to paint, right?
For myself, I’m in between those two approaches, pigments and a palette of my own. I learned first the history and uses of pigments, mostly because it’s fun to see history though another point of view than the one of warriors and politicians. And then I attached myself to create the colours I loved I my life.
I’m a step further now : I create the ones I would like to have in my life.
It’s way more fun than fighting with a starter set where all mixes will ultimately lead to shades of browns**.
It also fits my art better.
It’s all nice to live by traditional rules, but girls want to have fun.
*The colour named “flesh” is a peach pink. It’s a misnomer, and an infuriating one, but also a useful colour. Skin comes in as many colours as you want, and it’s rarely peach pink.
**If you mix red and blue and yellow, the primaries, what do you get? Browns. Not even pretty ones.