Acrylic Watercolor Painting

by Wendon Blake

  It seems to me that these ten colors form a reasonably complete palette that will solve most of the problems you face in an acrylic watercolor. To be perfectly honest, you can probably get along with even fewer colors. Particularly when they paint outdoors, I know a number of watercolorists who don’t carry more than half a dozen tubes.

  You’ll notice that I’ve left out any mention of green, since your two blues and two yellows will give you a fairly wide range of greens, which can be enriched still further by adding some touches of earth color. For the same reason, I’ve left out any mention of orange, since you have two reds and two yellows, as well as the earth colors, to mix more shades of orange than you can buy. You also have enough blues and reds to mix a variety of purples on those rare occasions when you need them.

  In short, I’ve followed John Pike’s theory that the irreducible palette is essentially a palette of primaries: blue, red, and yellow, with a warm and cool version of each. These six tubes, plus a hot and a subdued earth brown, will take you a long way before you need any other colors. Even the black and white are optional.

  When you shop for your colors, you’ll find that acrylics come in tubes, jars, and sometimes in plastic squeeze bottles. For leisurely work in the studio, jars and squeeze bottles are probably just as convenient as colors in tubes. But for all around use—including work outdoors—tube colors are your best choice. If you’ve already painted in watercolor, you’re probably used to tube colors anyhow, so stick with them.

  Colors You Might Want to Add

  I don’t mean to lay down the law that these ten colors are the only ones you’ll use for acrylic watercolor painting. I’m simply suggesting these ten tubes to get you started. Later on, you may discover lots of other colors that you prefer, and you’ll probably develop your own personal palette which reflects your own special preferences. Here are some other colors which you might want to try.

  Cerulean blue: Like the cadmiums, cerulean blue is a rather heavy, dense, somewhat opaque pigment for watercolor. But it’s just transparent enough, and it has a wonderful cool airiness that’s just right for skies and distant objects in the landscape. In mixtures, cerulean blue produces silvery grays and airy greens which suggest space and atmosphere.

  Cobalt blue: This is another very delicate blue, somewhat warmer than cerulean, which many watercolorists like for atmospheric effects. It’s not an all-purpose blue—not a workhorse like ultramarine or thalo blue—but has a soft, melting tone, quite unlike any other cool color on the palette. Because it has very limited tinting strength in mixtures, cobalt blue will cool and tone down another color without dominating the blend. Many painters like it for cool shadows.

  Phthalocyanine green: Like thalo blue, this is an extremely brilliant, transparent color, which socks you in the eye when used alone, and which has so much tinting strength that it tends to dominate other colors when mixed with them. Nonetheless, thalo green is a good all purpose green if you must have this color on your palette—although I still think you get better greens by mixing them. Although thalo green tends to look a bit garish when used all by itself, it can be subtly modified with touches of brown, blue, yellow, and even red to produce more interesting greens, which still remain luminous and transparent. Be careful when you mix thalo green with other colors, though, because it’s powerful enough to dominate almost any mixture; add just a touch at a time until you see what you get.

  Hooker’s green: This has always been a great favorite with watercolorists who like to have a ready made green that can be used without much modification for foliage and other landscape elements. Hooker’s green is a convenient time saver, and is easily modified by a touch of yellow, blue, or brown.

  Naples yellow: Although many watercolorists object to Naples yellow because it seems a bit too dense and opaque for transparent painting, it has a particularly soft, sunny quality, unlike any other yellow. It’s bright, but it doesn’t bounce out at you, and has a delightful way of keeping its place in the atmosphere of a picture. Naples yellow imparts this sunny softness to reds and browns, producing soft, golden tones, and can also give you some interesting, offbeat greens.

  Cadmium orange: Although you can easily create this color by mixing cadmium yellow and cadmium red, you may find it a convenient time saver to have cadmium orange on hand. Like the other cadmium colors, this one is intense, very powerful in mixtures with other colors, and slightly opaque. You can tone it down with a touch of brown, but a touch of blue or green may turn it to mud.

  Other cadmiums: I mentioned earlier that there are various shades of cadmium yellows and reds, ranging from light to dark. Although I recommended buying the lighter tones, since you can easily darken them, you may want other shades at some point. The darkest cadmium red, for instance, is a sonorous, deep red, which you won’t use often because it has tremendous weight in a picture. The darkest cadmium yellow is also a heavy, sonorous hue which seems to fall into a kind of middle ground between cadmium yellow and cadmium orange. Cadmium vermilion is a particularly bright, hot red-orange, stunning when used as an accent here or there. None of the darker cadmiums can be considered essential for your palette, but they’re so beautiful that I can understand the temptation to buy them and try them out. If you find that they lie around the studio unused, you can always lighten them up by mixing them with the other cadmiums to produce more versatile colors.

  Red oxide: Among the most fascinating of the earth colors are the various iron oxide reds. In oil painting, these are called Venetian red, light red, English red, and various Italian names which have gone out of use. In acrylics, these are generally called red oxide, iron oxide red, or light red. These are all strong, deep, faintly brownish reds, which look like various shades of the red clay used for roof tiles along the Mediterranean Coast. They tend to be dense and a bit opaque, but they’re unique among the hot colors in that they don’t leap out at you but tend to hold back a bit because of their earthy tone. They have a special combination of richness and restraint.

  Raw umber: This is a curious, almost indescribable earth tone, which varies a bit from one make to another. Raw umber is a kind of yellowish-greenish-grayish-brown, which sometimes looks like just plain mud, but which may be just right when you want a smoky, remote, earthy tone. It does have an atmospheric quality unlike any other warm tone on your palette. It also has very limited tinting strength and will gently tone down another color without radically altering the hue. You can mix it with almost anything without doing irreparable damage. As you thin out raw umber, it tends to get yellower, and the grayish tone disappears. In a perverse way, the value of this strange color lies in its weakness. It comes amazingly close to the vague color of dust blown along a dirt road.

  Payne’s gray: Although most watercolorists admit that you can mix practically any shade of gray with various combinations of blue and brown, there is one ready made gray which a lot of painters carry. Payne’s gray is a particularly airy, atmospheric color which watercolorists often carry as a time saver. It’s useful for distant, atmospheric tones, and for modifying blues and greens to make them more atmospheric too.

  Sea of Grass by Fred Messersmith, A.W.S., acrylic on 200 lb. paper, 22”x30”. Although it’s hard to scratch an acrylic painting when the surface is completely dry, acrylic color lends itself to a great deal of texturing while it’s still wet. An amazing variety of thick and thin lines can be struck into the surface, provided that the instruments are slightly blunt, not sharp enough to damage the surface of the paper. If you add a fair amount of acrylic medium—liquid or gel—the paint will take on a gummy consistency which is even easier to scrape and push around. Be sure to squeeze the color out of the paper, not scratch or abrade the painting surface.

  Every manufacturer’s catalog contains many more colors that I haven’t mentioned. There are a number of new yellows, reds, and violets—modern dye colors—which are available only in acrylics. These new dyes are brilliant, transparent, and tantalizing. But let me repeat my warning again
st cluttering up your paintbox with too much gear. You need very few colors to paint a successful acrylic watercolor. What you do need is mastery of these few colors. If you can’t handle a few colors well, having lots of colors won’t make the job any easier.

  If you like to have lots of colors on hand—as many watercolorists do—the trick is to use just a few of them in any one painting. There are experienced watercolorists who keep two dozen tubes of color on hand, but they rarely use more than six or eight for a picture. The whole idea is to visualize your picture in advance, then pick the limited number of tubes that will do the job. This is when you may want to pull out an “optional” blue for a particular sky effect, or one of the red oxides for an autumn landscape.

  How Colors Behave

  As you begin to try out the colors on your palette, you’ll discover that no two colors behave exactly alike. The hues themselves are different, of course; but this isn’t what I mean. You must get used to the actual handling qualities of each color. Here are some points to watch for.

  Pigments and dyes: As you thin out some of your tube colors, you’ll see that they’re composed of granules of color that may separate and have to be stirred carefully to make sure that they hold their place in the mixture. These are the so-called pigment colors. On the other hand, you’ll find that some tube colors, when you thin them out, behave like brightly colored smoke and instantly penetrate the water, medium, or other colors in the mixture. These non-granular colors are the dyes.

  It’s terribly important to know which of your colors are pigments and which are dyes. The pigments—which include ultramarine blue, the cadmiums, and the earth colors—are likely to rest on the surface longer, allowing you to push them around with the brush more freely. The dyes—thalo blue and green, hansa and AZO yellow, the naphthol reds, etc.—tend to penetrate the paper almost immediately, and take very little pushing around with the brush. Thus, you must plan your attack with special care when you’re working with dye colors. The pigments are a bit easier to handle and are less likely to get out of control.

  Opacity and transparency: As I hope I’ve made clear already, some colors are dense and opaque, while others are more transparent. All colors, when thinned with water or acrylic medium, are reasonably transparent, but some are like sheets of cloudy glass, while others are like sheets of clear glass. The cadmiums and the iron oxide reds, for example, have a bit more covering power than thalo blue or naphthol crimson or burnt sienna. The latter are as clear as stained glass.

  These questions of opacity and transparency are particularly important when you lay one color over another. A very transparent color will allow the underlying wash to shine through; the underlying and overlying colors will appear to mix and form a third color, like two sheets of clear, brightly colored glass. But an overwash of slightly opaque color will cloud the underlying color and may overwhelm it. Thus, a wash of AZO yellow over a wash of blue gives you a clear, bright green; the blue will shine through the yellow. But an overwash of cadmium yellow is more likely to cloud the underlying blue and form a yellowish haze which allows less of the blue to come through.

  Don’t interpret this as some sort of law against using the more opaque colors as overwashes. There are times when this is just what you want. You don’t always want a transparent overwash that allows the underlying color to come through full force. The point is simply that you must know which colors are more opaque, which are more transparent, so you can get the effect you want.

  Tinting strength: You’ll recall that I warned you against sloshing too much thalo blue or thalo green into a mixture. These colors have exceptional tinting strength, which means that they have a strong influence on any mixture in which they’re used. The same is true of the cadmiums. Ultramarine blue and most of the earth colors, on the other hand, have less impact on a mixture and you can use them more freely without fear of spoiling the blend.

  So then, you must get used to the various tinting strengths of each color on your palette. By practicing, you can learn how much to add to get the exact tone that you want.

  Behavior in mixtures: The color textbooks all tell you that blue and red make violet, blue and yellow make green, red and yellow make orange, etc. Theoretically, this is all true. But tube colors don’t always obey the rules. Your basic palette—if you accept the ten colors I’ve recommended—contains two blues, two yellows, two reds, and two browns, not only because they’re different colors in themselves, but because they behave quite differently in mixtures.

  Color mixtures can be unpredictable. Try mixing ultramarine blue and cadmium red, for instance. Do you get a bright, clean violet, as you might expect? No, you get a weird tone, unlike anything you might expect unless you’ve tried this before. I won’t tell you what it is; you try it. I won’t catalog all these unexpected possibilities here, but you’ll soon find that each color on your palette has its own peculiar way of acting in combination with each other color on your palette.

  In the concluding section of this chapter, I’ll explain how to test out your various colors so you can learn how to predict their behavior when you start to paint.

  Testing Colors

  It makes no sense for me to try to describe how each color on your palette will behave in actual painting practice. You just have to experience it for yourself. You’ve got to see it. The easy way is to test out your various colors on odd scraps of paper, rather than find out the hard way when you’re smack in the middle of a painting. So gather up some more scraps of paper; they don’t really have to be expensive watercolor paper, since any white, sturdy sheet will do. Now squeeze out a dab of each color on your palette, fill your water jars, and take hold of your biggest sable brush.

  (1) First you’re going to wash each color on your palette over a dried wash of every other color on your palette. Wet your brush and dip it into the first color on your palette; then add some water and paint a strip of color about an inch wide and a foot long. Do the same with every other color on the palette. You can skip the black and white, but you should have a test strip of everything else.

  One way to learn how your colors behave is by optical mixing. Make a stroke of one color, let it dry, then cross it with a stroke of another color. You’re “mixing” the two colors by laying one over the other like two sheets of colored glass. The effect is quite different from mixing the two colors physically on your palette, then applying the mixture as a single stroke.

  A useful way of finding out how your colors behave when mixed is to paint a stroke of one color, then paint a stroke of another color so that the two intersect while still wet. At the point where the two strokes meet, a third color will appear, and you can compare this with the two original colors.

  See how three colors intermix by painting a strip of each and bringing them together (while wet) in the form of a Y. At the intersection, a third color will result. Using plenty of cheap scrap paper, try this with all the colors on your palette.

  When all these test strips are dry, mix up a big wash of the first color on your palette. Then paint a little bar of color—about an inch wide and 3” long—that crosses each test strip like a bridge going over a highway. Repeat this process with every color on your palette, so that each foot-long test strip has eight or ten or twelve little bridges of color running across it.

  When you’ve done all this, go back and look at each test strip very carefully. See what color you’ve made at each point where the overwash—or bridge—crosses the underwash. Note which overwashes are transparent and allow the underwash to shine through; equally important, note which overwashes are slightly opaque and tend to cloud the underwash. Note how different blues, different reds, different yellows, etc., produce different colors, and not always the ones you expect.

  (2) You’ve now tried what might be called optical mixing. That is, you haven’t actually mixed the colors while they’re wet; instead, you’ve mixed them in the eye of the observer, who sees the two colors as one, even though they were applied to the paper s
eparately.

  Now you’re going to mix the colors—mix them physically—while they’re actually wet. You’re going to mix every color on your palette with every other color on your palette.

  Again, you’re going to paint two strips of color which meet. But this time, they’ll meet when they’re wet. Dip your brush quickly into the dab of color on your palette, add some water, then paint a strip about an inch wide and about two or three inches long. Wash your brush, pick up another color from the palette, add some water, and paint a similar strip that forms a kind of V with the first strip. The two strips will mingle at the point where they meet—you can mingle them with the brush if they don’t do it by themselves—and form a small pool.

  When each V dries, compare the arms of the V—the two strips of pure, unmixed color—with the pool in which the colors have become mingled. Observe which color has more tinting strength, which color dominates the mixture. Try to remember the unexpected colors that turned up. If you were particularly observant while you were mingling the wet colors, you may have noticed that some colors were granular—the pigment colors—and tended to stay on the surface of the paper, while the dye colors penetrated the mixture immediately and also sank right into the paper.