click the image to see a large version (500kb) with some commentary. sometimes people ask me nuts-and-bolts kinds of questions. i don't find the answers to brands and such to be incredibly useful since i don't think brands or mediums or whatever will be the magic bullet that turns you into a good artist. good materials are the final thing, really, in the equation.
that said, my palette is not quality material. since i have a rather mobile and compact studio, i've gone back to those 11x14" or whatever basic disposable palettes. i used to have another setup back in my home studio which was more involved, but this is what i'm using now. i hold it these days because i can and because i have so little taboret room to work with.
my paints vary in brands. i still have some 12 year old large tubes of utrecht brand paint from college, believe it or not. along the way i've tried most of the other brands. grumbacher i liked, but their caps suck--they have a tendency to split, which will quickly ruin the entire tube if you can't squeeze it into something better for storage. on this palette, burnt umber and ultramarine blue are rembrandt brand which i haven't used as much but are alright. a little "soft" perhaps for my tastes, but brands are limited, locally. when i can, i try to buy the winsor and newton expensive line--and yes, they are expensive. for basic, cheap colors like white, and the earth colors and such it's worth it to pay a little more for what i consider the best, as these colors can often be the bulk of your usage. it gets hard to spring the cash for a 37ml tube of cadmium whatever, i know. i might go mid-range for those: grumbacher or utrecht. avoid "student grade" paints if you can. they are full of wax as filler and substitute pigments that approximate their expensive cousins the way "pancake syrup" approximates real, honest maple syrup; which is to say, they are foul replacements. could you do with them in a pinch? sure, with some difficulty. and you could also eat pancakes with "log cabin"...but i wouldn't recommend it. in college i was tempted by those giant tubes of winton colors, winsor & newton's student line. they were wretched, but i was a broke student.
there's a method to how i lay out my paints: warm to the right, cool to the left starting with yellow (so if i used a cool yellow like hansa, which i don't, it would be immediately to the left of white). what's there is my basic setup--not all my standard colors are on the palette all the time. over the years i've used red oxide as my primary red and cadmium for spot bright reds quite a lot. lately i've left red oxide off because i feel i tend towards subdued palettes a bit too often and red oxide is very low chroma (vividness). cobalt blue is my favored cool blue and is absent here. ivory black is typical, i just felt like trying permalba. it's fine; i mean, it's black so what else could i want? if i'm doing foliage i'm never without chromium oxide green. i make my own greens as well, but i love that tube green as a base to alter. i often make my own browns, especially if chrome oxide is on the palette (for a weak, chalky brown) and sometimes use black + orange or red. i'm often too lazy to mix a green and then add red to it. other standard earth colors like siena or ochre appear relatively infrequently, but i keep 'em around just in case.
dioxazine purple has become a must-have for me. i use it to darken yellows and to make a "black" which tends towards violet a bit by mixing it with burnt umber. most use ultramarine blue + burnt umber for this purpose but it's a matter of taste. the purple has a lower chroma than ultramarine blue and is cooler, which i think makes for a darker black. also, i can use it in flesh shadows without worrying about the flesh turning green since the other black mix runs that risk. being partially red/green color-blind, i flee from situations that might leave me painting green skin without my noticing. it's happened.
i recently started using walnut oil in its raw and alkyd form. i used liquin for years, and liked it for the most part, as well as poppyseed oil for slow-drying. so far i'm liking these better. mediums are the place where artists vary most. there are so many recipes for "magic bullet" mediums and everyone has their own. i've tried a lot of them and have tended towards the simplest. i've even done entire paintings with only paint thinner. we're talking industrial grade paint thinner! yes, it required lots of varnish to wake it up again after it went dull, but it shows that while mediums can facilitate your work and give you a slight edge if you find one that gels with your painting methods, ultimately it's not absolutely required.
hmm, this isn't at all where i thought today's post would go. i intended the palette photo to lead to talking about bob ross.... then i started adding text to the image and ended up with this. well, bob ross will have to wait til another entry.
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