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Advice on Colours
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Message
Posted
I've become ever more unhappy with the acrylic paints I use and recently I've thought about switching to oil paints. I wonder if anyone would be kind enough to recommend a range of colours. I'm looking for the minimum number of colours to cut costs, say white, black and the three primary colours. Would one of each suffice or would I need a couple of each to cover all the possible hues?
Posted
That’s cutting it to the bottom line Bill!
Strictly speaking you can mix black of course…
titanium white, yellow ochre or raw sienna, French ultramarine, quinacridone red, blue/black (W&N) or burnt umber, plus perhaps burnt sienna or light red.
There are so many possibilities for a limited palette, everyone will offer up different combinations. There is the Zorn palette of course, you can mix hundreds of combinations from his four colours.
For value for money, I’ve found the Jackson’s own range of oil paints excellent! I wrote a test report on them for The Artist a while back and was most impressed… and at a competitive price!
Here again, others will have different suggestions on brands.
Edited
by Alan Bickley
Posted
Thank you Alan for your tips. I think I was looking at the Jackson range today in Edinburgh. I'll look into them further.
Thanks too Denise. I was going to go for Windsor and Newton's Winton range, which seemed not too expensive at £11 for 200 ml.
On the primary colours, I used to work with dyes and pigments and I remember that reds diluted down to either orange or pink, blues to green or lilac. So I wondered if I might need two reds and two blues, to ensure I always got clean secondary colours, with maybe cadmium yellow, zinc white and a black - or as you suggest maybe just mix leftover colours to get a very dark colour. I haven't painted with oils since I was a teenager and I miss the smell of them - I can conjure it up right now. Acrylics aren't the same and there's no tradition as with oils..
Posted
Totally agree Bill, the smell of oil paint and turps is life’s blood to me!
Obviously any more single pigment colours you can add is a bonus, but I’ve cut my list down to the absolute basics.
For my money, the Jackson’s range (not their professional range, which are also excellent) are a much better paint to work with than the Winton range. I’m using them all the time these days, great quality for the money.
Obviously I use other brands as well, my first choice would generally be W&N Artists’ quality if you can afford them.
But… at £11 for a set of the Winton will serve as a good starting point, nothing wrong with them.
If you take The Artist magazine, I’ve got a feature in the current (May) edition, which has just been published.
I’ve been looking at the oil paintings and working methods of Edward Seago - he used a limited palette… plus a 4-stage WIP in his style which you might find helpful.
This is a cut and paste from my article relating to his palette:
Pic 1 Seago’s palette: He painted exclusively using Winsor & Newton Artist quality oils.
Flake white (use titanium white), yellow ochre, alizarin crimson (or quinacridone red), French ultramarine, Blue/black or indigo, chrome yellow (use cadmium yellow), viridian, Indian red or light red, vermilion, burnt sienna.
Edited
by Alan Bickley
Posted
Thank you for this information, Alan. This is very useful to me. People here seem to like the Jackson's range, so I'll definitely check them out. Even if they cost a little more it may be worth it for the quality. I currently buy acrylic paints at £3 a tube in The Range and they're so dilute I struggle to get a hard edge or enough opacity. Colourwise, it looks like my minimum palette should be
titanium white
cadmium yellow
alizarin crimson
French ultramarine or phthalo blue
That would get me started and I could add more as the situation demands.
I don't subscribe to The Artist but I would like to read that article, so I'll look into it. Thanks for posting the excerpt! I appreciate your helpfulness.
Posted
A basic range - hmm. White obviously - probably Titanium, you won't want to be throwing a ton of cash at the lead whites at this juncture; black, if you like - make it Ivory or Mars Black: or mix a tonal black; Burnt Sienna; Cadmium Red Light; Quinacridone violet, or red, or magenta - this one is also known as Permanent Rose in some ranges, PV19 is the pigment name; Yellow Ochre; Raw Sienna; Cadmium Yellow Light; Lemon Yellow; Viridian; Ultramarine.
Later on, you'll be wanting to add Cerulean Blue or Cobalt Blue. (The 'Hue' versions are basically mixes of Pthalo Blue - on the whole you're better off without them, though the W&N Manganese Blue (Hue) is pretty good.)
Or - and this is about as basic as I could make it, others may do better - a modified Zorn palette: White, Cadmium Red, Yellow Ochre, Black, plus a blue; probably Ultramarine, and a bright Yellow, like Cadmium Yellow.
Brands: Daler Rowney, Georgian Range and Artists' range; what little I've had from Jacksons was good; there's a range of oils on the Ken Bromley website: I can vouch for their Cadmium Yellow. There are many more brands available, some expensive, most expensive for good reasons - eg the Michael Harding paints, the Wallace Seymour range, Rublev, Old Holland, which you'll want to graduate to as you continue to progress. And then there's the Talens Rembrandt range, which is generally very good.
This IS all going to involve a considerable outlay on your part at the outset; there's no satisfactory way around that - but you will have a product that will last for decades in the tube: I'm finishing off a tube of Winsor & Newton's Cadmium Red, which I know is at least 40 years old - suggesting to me that I ought to use Cad Red more often.....
Two further notes: Alizarin Crimson has a dubious reputation - it fades in tints and glazes; and I haven't recommended Pthalo Blue or Green because - I don't like them; but they are reasonably cheap to make, and thus to buy. And other people DO get on with them.
Posted
Back in the seventies when I first picked up acrylics I limited myself to 2 reds (alizarin crimson and Vermillion - both hues), 2 blues (ultramarine and monestral), 2 yellows (Winsor yellow and yellow ochre) along with Burnt Umber and Titanium White. Twenty years late I did buy some Mars Black for a specific painting (portrait with black background) and found it can make interesting greens when mixed with yellow. Monestral Blue seems to have been replaced by Phthalocyanine Blue (both shades). I seem to have gone crazy with yellow replacing Winsor yellow with Lemon Yellow as well as Cadmium Yellow (both light and deep shades). None of the substitutions were because I was unhappy but names and offerings changed and I was searching for an alternative. I have a little used tube of Dioxazine Purple (again bought for a specific purpose). I bought a tube of Payne's Grey to experiment with and some Zinc White to try in mixes. The Payne's Grey has been little used and the Zinc White is unopened, but that is because the muse has abandoned me for a while. Can't say I have really wanted for more.
Posted
Well, there's been a lot of good advice here. If you follow it all, you'll have dozens of tubes and will spend a fortune, so what should you do? I think you should decide on what you wish to paint, and then think out a colour scheme using a limited number of colours (restricted palette). Include whether you want sympathetic or complementary colours, warm colours or cold ones. Then do a bit of research on the internet to identify precisely the colours you need, e.g. the colours for warm or cold greens. Use of a downloadable colour wheel app will help. I never use black from a tube as it tends to be lifeless. I mix it from burnt umber and ultramarine blue.
If you are at the stage where you exhibit your work, I would recommend artists' grade colours. These contain more pigment than the students' grade such as Winton or Georgian. I also recommend Jacksons's colours which come in three grades. The top and most expensive grade is the "professional". Only worth buying if you are top professional artist. It contains the most pigment. The next grade is effectively the artist's grade and is cheaper than, but probably as good as, other well-known makes. The cheapest grade is the student's.
If you think it out, you will probably only need about six tubes, which will cost you about £50. Add a large tube of white.
The best place I've found to buy canvas board or canvas is Loxley Arts, which have a good range and which is a lot cheaper than many makers'. Find them by Google. They deliver, or you can click and collect from their warehouse in Sheffield. You have to click on what you want, before the full range of sizes and prices comes up.
Good luck.