In my blog, I am trying various color schemes to expand my painting vocabulary.  To that end, I am selecting a different color scheme/limited palette each week and basing three little 8 x 6 paintings upon that color palette.  If you have any suggestions of color palettes I should try, please email me at nvenhuizen@gmail.com. ( I’d love to have a comment section on this page, but I haven’t yet figured out how to do that!)

It is almost Easter, and I decided to try a pastel colored palette this week, as Easter decorations are usually in pastel colors.  Basically, a pastel color is any color that is mixed with white.  I mixed a darker green and a darker gray/brown mixture for accents, but basically used only the pastel versions of the following pigments.  Because I used pastel colors for these paintings, the paintings are in a much higher key than most of my paintings.  I like the bright, cheerful look that a pastel palette imparts so I will definitely be using this palette again!  Before I began, I mixed each of the below pigments with an approximately equal amount of titanium white.  The photo of my palette(below) was taken when I was about midway through doing the following three paintings-

Dioxazine Purple

Viridian

Ultramarine Blue

Cadmium Orange

Alizarin Crimson

Cadmium Red 

Cerulean Blue

Cadmium Yellow

Palisades

Old Railroad Bridge

Garden Trellis

Pastel Colored Palette

In my blog, I am trying various color schemes to expand my painting vocabulary.  To that end, I am selecting a different color scheme/limited palette each week and basing three little 8 x 6 paintings upon that color palette. 

The color palette I used for the following paintings is-

Dioxazine Purple

Cerulean Blue

Cadmium Yellow

Titanium White

I like this color palette for spring, as the new leaves and plants in spring are a bright yellow green.  Since purple and yellow are complementary colors, purplish-gray shadows make the yellow green trees and plants seem very bright.

In my blog, I am trying various color schemes to expand my painting vocabulary.  To that end, I am selecting a different color scheme/limited palette each week and basing three little 8 x 6 paintings upon that color palette. 

A couple blogs ago I talked about the basic palette of Ultramarine Blue, Alizarin Crimson, Cadmium Yellow and white which I used almost exclusively for several years.  This week, I altered that basic palette and replaced Alizarin Crimson with Burnt Sienna.   It worked well since this week, as I did three little paintings of Falls Park in Sioux Falls, SD and the lightened form of Burnt Sienna is very close to the same color as the Sioux quartzite which is everywhere in Falls Park.  The colors that I used this week were:

Ultramarine Blue

Cadmium Yellow

Burnt Sienna

Titanium White

Waterfall at Falls Park $30

$30 Sparkling Water Falls Park

Stone Ruin at Falls Park $30