When I reference the colors in my collection I use handheld swatch sheets arranged by hue. I use a 12-point system, and each point has a sheet (plus one for gray):

But I wondered what it would be like to arrange the colors by chroma. I use the HLC color system (often called HCL; same info, different order). It categorizes colors by hue, luminance (variation from white), and chroma (variance from a grey of the same luminance). Chroma is also called colorfulness. Saturation is a related concept. I get my data from the wonderful artistspigments website.

Generally speaking, paints of high chroma appear brighter and more intense that those with low chroma, which can appear dull or muted, and approach gray. In the sheet at the top of this post, which only includes colors from the 3 and 4 points (reds and red-oranges) of the color wheel, the highest chroma paints are at upper left and the lowest at lower right. I can imaging a painting where you might be looking for a paint with some desired degree of intensity.

This is the first time I have used this swatch format. I downloaded a template generously provide by Anthony Roebuck at Watercolor Affair. His template is an 8.5 x 11 pdf. I modified it for my purposes in Photoshop and printed on 9 x 12 in. student-grade Fabriano watercolor paper. It would be better or course to do the swatches on the artist-grade papers I paint on, but I have a couple pads of this paper that I’m trying to use up for craft projects.

I think that Roebuck will not mind my sharing his key to the template:

My main modifications:

• in the text section I provide HLC info
• I don’t like abbreviations for staining, granulating, etc, so I write these words out. I don’t necessarily include every category for every paint. Instead I select the ones I think most useful
• Instead of a lifting test in the top color space I show the color as glazed with 2 or 3 coats. I use underpainting and glazing a lot in my painting. The lifting test seems useful but I couldn’t find a place to put it that looked pretty (and, technique aside, I think the sheet is pretty). I think it can be inferred from staining info
• The transparency line is a 0.8 microline. Degrees of opacity can be judged by how clear it seems
• Some of my gradients look good and others, well, less so. To some degree this reflects a quality of the paint. But it also is affected by the student-grade paper, and my technique (for example, it took some time to find the best size brush, which turned out to be a no. 8 round).

As I said, this is my first time using this swatch format. We’ll see how useful I find it, and maybe there will be a follow-up post at some point. Stay tuned.

As with the majority of my watercolor paintings, I started with line art. I used Platinum Carbon Black ink with a Platinum Procyon fountain pen.

For this painting I made a swatch sheet of the pigments I used. The numbers at upper left told me where to find the paints among my flower palettes, which was handy. (I haven’t specified brands or pigments because this was just for my use, and I know what the paints are.)

I hadn’t done this before, but I found it helpful. I could hold the swatch sheet up to the painting to help choose colors. The colors in the painting don’t exactly match the swatches because I often glaze one color over another.

The awning is mainly DS Phthalo Turquoise, PB15, PG36. Though not a single-pigment paint, it’s a great granulating semi-transparent cyan, and a somewhat unusual color. It fit nicely between the middle blues, WN Cerulean Blu (PB35) and DS Prussian Blue (PB27). These blues can be seen at the front of the boat, among many other places.

The yellow green I used, DS Serpentine Genuine, turned out okay, but I found it a bit difficult to work with. It’s less yellow than Rich Green Gold (PY129), but it contains yellow-brown flecks that disperse and granulate very strongly.

WN Potter’s Pink (PR233) is a favorite of mine. It’s a highly granulating kind of red-magenta, but with relatively low chroma, so muted (some would say weak). I used it more or less as the main red in this painting, which is unusual. It can be seen most clearly in the building at the back in the far right.

Here is the reference photo I used for this painting. It’s just a cell phone photo. I simplified the background buildings and removed some figures.

For the Maya, the Tree of Life, called Yaxche, is traditionally a Ceiba tree. This is a tall tree in the mallow family, with large buttressed roots, a remarkably straight trunk, and a high horizontal crown. The roots are said to shelter bats, symbolic of the underworld. The trunk teems with insect life, and attracts the animals and birds that feed on them. The crown spreads wide over the jungle canopy, often with four branches that would suggest the four cardinal directions that are so significant to the Maya. The eagles that roost there represent the celestial realm.

The axis mundi is the navel of the world. A Yaxche could be found at the center of most pre-Columbian Mesoamerican villages. The Tree of Life is a natural analog to the constructed Mayan temple, which was also a vertical structure representing the passage from subterranean to heavenly realms.

For the ancient Maya, the cross was viewed as an iconic representation of the Yaxche, so that in the symbol of the cross Christian and traditional motifs are confounded. This may account in part for the power of the Talking Cross that summoned the Maya of the Yucatan to rebellion during the long period of the War of the Castes (1847–1915). Ceiba flowers served as the pattern for earflares worn by Classic Maya kings; in modern Mayan ceremonies, the same blossoms are used to decorate crosses. The Tree of Life motif is also commonly found as a design element in highland Maya textiles.

The photo was taken by Ellen Christensen near Copan Ruinas in Honduras around New Year’s 2002, as butterflies flitted about and monkeys chattered overhead.

This post originally appeared on the website buriedmirror.com. I am closing that and my other websites and bringing some content here to rightreading.com.

Watercolor paints are available in tubes and pans, and most watercolor artists favor one or the other. Pans are convenient for plein air painting and for travel. 

(Watercolor pencils are another possibility for travel, as they pack well and can be used like watercolor paints with the addition of water. They are my current travel preference. I use Caran d’Ache museum aquarelles, which are loaded with pigment. And Caran d’Ache, unlike most brands, provides pigment and lightfastness information for their pencils.)

In truth, though, when I travel I mostly concentrate on photography, and I use the photos as references for paintings when I’m back in the studio. While I have a set of pans, most of my work is photography-based studio painting, for which I find pans a bit cramped and messy. I also feel that tubes tend to have more pigment concentration and give richer, more vibrant colors.

Tube pigments can be squeezed out onto a plain white porcelain plate, where they can be mixed and diluted as desired. But I like to have at least a little paint always readily available, and for this I use flower palettes. Recently I redid my palettes a little, removing pigments from the center cell, which I now just use for paint ID. The six outer compartments of the flower palettes are sloped, so the palette can be held in the hand and the water moved around to different areas to give different proportions of pigment and water. The center compartments are smaller and flat, and inconvenient.

For the center compartment paint IDs I print the info inside an appropriately sized circle on student grade watercolor papers using InDesign, and then cut it out and set it inside. But sometimes when lazy I just scrawl some notes — that’ll hold it for now.  For this I use my fine-nib Platinum Procyon fountain pen with Platinum Carbon Black ink, the same combo I use for most of my ink and watercolor paintings. Platinum is a Japanese brand. I love that pen! And the carbon black ink is absolutely waterproof.

When thinking about color, I like to begin with the most natural and efficient primaries, cyan, magenta, and yellow. These are the same colors used in CMYK printing. (K stands for “key,” black. The black plate was called the key plate because it was used to align the others.) Printers quickly discovered that the schoolroom primaries most of us were taught – blue, red, and yellow – are inefficient and tend to give inferior results.

So if we begin with these primaries and then add secondary and tertiary colors between them, we end up with a twelve-segment color wheel. There’s nothing particularly god-given about this, and you could certainly divide the wheel up differently (for my gouache paints I made a nine-segment color wheel). But I find the twelve-part spectrum most convenient for my watercolors.

I confess I have a lot more paints than I need. I am fascinated by them, and can’t help playing with a few new ones now and then. The colors are so wonderful, and the behaviors of the different pigments are so varied and interesting! And while any particular painting will likely use a limited number of paints, it’s nice to quickly be able to see and compare the options. 

I make one swatch card for each of the twelve color ranges. I divide 11 x 14 inch student-grade paper (I just can’t bring myself to use my best watercolor paper for this) into four sections, so each card is 5½ x 7 inches. This is a great size, big enough to be useful but small enough to be conveniently held in the hand, and to take up little area in the work space. These cards have room to add more paints.

I print the swatch cards (again using InDesign) with rectangular rules for the swatches. My printer is a Canon Pro-100, which is said to be archival. The font is Scala Sans Pro Bold 8.5 pt. I print the following information: 

• Brand: Most are WN, Winsor and Newton, or DS, Daniel Smith, though there are a few others
• Paint name: These are marketing-driven and vary wildly among manufacturers, so they are unreliable predictors of color, but they ID the paint (as a result of variations in the production process, the same pigment can yield very different colors), and some, such as Burnt Sienna, Smalt, or Viridian, at least allude to historical colors
• Pigment information: I favor single-pigment paints, but I am far from rigorous about it. Yes, I could mix PB28, Cobalt Blue, with PV19, Quinacridone Violet, to make my own cobalt blue violet. But Daniel Smith has already mixed them for me, so why not use that?
• Hue information: My cards are, as I have said, organized by hue. The system that I use is HLC (hue, lightness, and chroma/intensity). It is the most natural to me, and it enables categorizing hue in terms of angle on the spectrum circle. This enables each of my 12 color segments to be associated with a range of hue angles. I chose the angle parameters based on how the pigments seemed to fall out and my visual sense of the colors, rather than strictly mathematically. The exception is a card of low-value — basically gray — paints, for which hue is a secondary consideration)
• Misc. info such as transparency, granulation, etc.: Once upon a time I maintained a spreadsheet with complete information, similar to what is found in BruceMacEvoy’s handprint.com, but I rarely consulted it. On these cards I just put a thing or two that I think I might want to remember when choosing a paint from this card
• Palette location The number at the right indicates which palette the paint is stored on. At present I have twelve palettes, which I keep in two stacks of six, with one color left over. That’s, let’s see, 73 paints. I guess I’ll need to get a couple more flower palettes.

The HLC values of the paints come from the extraordinary (and free) web database artistpigments.org. The database is comprehensive and extremely useful. Highly recommended!

I will leave you with a tiny final tip: when it comes time to wet the palette compartments, I favor this water brush, because it is convenient, and you can precisely control the amount of water it releases. Recently I had one that for some reason sprang a leak, and I had to use watercolor brushes to wet the pigments instead. I hated that and quickly ordered a replacement.

Happy painting!

This is my first attempt at gouache. And when I say gouache, I mean I mixed watercolor pigments with the only tube of gouache I have (apart from Daniel Smith dot cards), Holbein’s Permanent White, haha. (The pigment is PW6, titanium dioxide.) I liked working with this medium so much I ordered Holbein’s primary gouache set. It uses what I consider the best primaries, cyan, magenta, and yellow, as well as white and black. Perhaps my long experience with CMYK printing will be of benefit in using this set.

In this image I also used a bit of Daniel Smith iridescent watercolors (from dot cards) for a touch of sparkle, though it is hard to see the effect in a still photo. Speaking of photos, I took the reference photo for the image in March 2013. I use only my own photos for photo-based artworks, because I consider the photography part of the work.

Comparison could be made to Frank Gehry’s fountain — called “A Rose for Lilly,” named for Lillian Disney, sponsor of the project — at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, which is also made of broken tiles, in this case blue and white Delft china.

I will report on my experience with the Holbein gouaches after they arrive and I have a chance to play with them a bit.

This small watercolor recalls a 2017 trip to Maine. It’s my second attempt at this subject. A couple of years ago I tried a larger version, attempting to detail each individual rock. That approach might work for someone, but it failed for me. This time I kept things broad stroke (if we can call anything done with nos. 2 and 3 rounds broad stroke), and I like the result better.

This water color breaks one “rule.” Watercolor lore is rife with arts-and-crafts-like “rules” — never use white, only the white of the paper; don’t mix too many colors, you’ll get “mud”; use only single-pigment paints or you will lose control; never outline or it will be mere illustration, not fine art; don’t use gouache, it will ruin the refinement of watercolor; etc., etc. This is why Gerhard Richter did his watercolors on typing paper and other non art papers — to free himself from the preciousness of such restraints.

In a post called Is blue the most important color? Swedish artist and teacher Erik Lundgren (who is a very good watercolor blogger) says that “blue sets the tone for a painting’s coloring.” Consequently, he argues in favor of using only one blue in a painting. But he allows that “Sometimes it is possible to use two different blue colors, but then they should not be used individually unmixed, but they work better when mixed with each other.”

This is probably generally sound advice, and I appreciate the virtues of a limited palate, such as you can see in my painting of the Milan Duomo.

In the painting of Nubble Light House, however, I used five different blues. The sky is DS Cobalt blue, the distant water is DS Blue Apatite Genuine, the middle water is WN Cerulean Blue, then there is a bit of either WN Cobalt Turquoise Light or the very similar DS Cobalt Teal Blue, and the foreground puddles are DS French Ultramarine. In theory this should not work, but IMHO it does in this little painting. (Let me know if you agree or disagree.)

The Nubble Light House is one of the prettiest lighthouses I have seen. It is located in Sohier Park in Cape Neddick, York, Maine, near the town of Ogunquit. About 100 yards offshore on a small rocky island, the lighthouse was built in 1879, and the original lighthouse and perhaps outbuildings are still standing (though no doubt much repaired and updated). The 41-foot-high lighthouse — built of cast iron lined with brick and equipped with a Fresnel lens — remains in use today.

No. 85000844 on the National Register of Historic Places, the lighthouse is a New England icon: its image was included among the Voyager spacecraft materials so that any extraterrestials the ship encounters can gape at it, just as we do.

The day before we visited we were hit by an April Fool’s Day storm that dumped ten inches of snow on us. But when we got to the lighthouse the sky was clear and blue. Here is the reference photo for my painting. It was shot on an Olympus E-PL2, ƒ/14, 1/200, 40mm, ISO200.

The visit to Nubble made me recall a few other lighthouses I’ve visited, some of which I was able to dig up from my photo files. My favorites are two Northern California lighthouses, the Pigeon Point Lighthouse near Pescadero (the tallest on the U.S. Pacific coast), and the Point Cabrillo Light Station near Mendocino.

The Point Cabrillo Lighthouse near Mendocino (and the small community of Caspar) is one of the most complete remaining lighthouse complexes.

And here are a few others I found among my photos (including a couple taken on primitive devices):

One of the striking things about lighthouses is that despite their common function they exhibit extraordinary architectural diversity.

First of all, I choose as primary colors cyan, magenta, and yellow (the color triad I am familiar with from many years of press checking museum art catalogues).

The notion of “primary colors” is fraught, so lets not go there. If you want to know the history and theory, you could do worse than start with Bruce McEvoy — for example, his pages on the whether primary colors exist and creating a basic palette. We can skip to his conclusion. He says, “After much historical trial and error, it has been found that the most effective selection is a ‘primary‘ triad palette of magenta, yellow, and cyan. (Note that middle red and middle blue are not the best ‘primary’ colors.)”

Combining cyan, magenta, and yellow gives three secondary colors, green, red orange, and blue violet. Splitting the differences between those six colors gives six tertiary colors. In short, this system divides the color wheel into twelve color points. There are, of course, other ways to do it, but this twelve-segment color wheel works for me.

So when I am painting I think about which of the twelve color categories I am interested in. I have swatch samples divided into these same twelve color ranges. (The swatch cards, shown above, are 5-1/2 x 7 inches, a convenient size to hold in the hand.)

I store my tubes in art bins. (I do have some travel pans for occasional use, but for me pans seem small and messy, and most of my watercolors are photo-based so I don’t do a lot of plein air painting). In the bins, the tubes are arranged following more or less this same twelve-part system (some categories are combined).

I keep small samples of all of my paints in Richeson 7-Well Flower Palettes. These palettes are not organized in the same twelve-part way, because they have developed organically, according to the order of purchasing. Instead, my swatch cards tell me on which palette to find the paints (for example, in the red orange swatch card above, you can see that the left column colors can be found on palettes 1, 4, 1, 4, and 7). Often a small amount is all I need. I like these palettes because the wells are sloped (except the center sections, which I no longer use for paints and instead use for paint IDs), and they can be tilted to adjust the proportions of pigments and water.

If I need to use or mix larger quantities of paints, I generally use Yasutomo Porcelain Saucers, which are 3-1/2 inches in diameter (or occasionally a small porcelain plate).

I used to keep a spreadsheet of paint properties (staining, granulating, etc.) but found that I rarely referred to it. Now, if I need to, I tend to use the internet instead. There’s a limit, even for me.

I don’t always paint the same way, but I do have a photography-based process that I’ve developed that works for me. The most important part of this process is creating a good photo, and that entails all the photography skills developed over years of experience. That part of the process is beyond what I can discuss here.

I consider photography an essential part of the artistic process, and I exclusively use my own photos.

I open the photo in Photoshop and change anything that needs changing, such as removing unwanted figures, cleaning up things creeping into the edges of the frame, and so on. My main editing, though, is done with the Camera Raw filter, just as it is for producing photo images for print or electronic presentation. I especially look at contrast, vibrance, geometry, texture, and color grading.

Here I want to talk briefly about producing a version of the photo I can use as a guide to pen and ink drawing. To prepare a color image for conversion to black and white, I might reduce texture and increase clarity (not something I would be likely to do if the finished product was a photo print).

Next, I apply a Photoshop action I have refined that converts the photo into line art. I wrote about my first experiments a few years ago with this process in this post, though I think the result I showed at that time was a bit ugly compared to what I do now. But it still conveys the basic strategy, which often produces better results than the “find edges” filter. As a final step I adjust the darkness of the image by duplicating the black and white images and applying the “multiply” mode, sometimes doing this several times. (The image shown here is darker than it probably would be purely as a painting guide.)

I won’t describe all my steps. The exact procedure is not important, and a search around the web could probably find various approaches to producing line art from a pixel-based image. (Unfortunately, I do not have Illustrator available to me, so I can’t use that to create a vector image.) The main thing is that the results of this process serve as a guide to line drawing, and they are often helpful for visualizing image values.

To me they somewhat resemble Catherwood’s engravings for Incidents of Travel in Yucatan. And that is wonderful.

The Peranakan cultural group inhabits the Malay Peninsula, including Singapore, where the reference photo for this watercolor was shot. Most (though not all) Peranakans are of mixed Chinese and Malaysian descent. Architecturally, Peranakan buildings often show a mix of Portuguese with East and Southeast Asian elements. Many buildings, like this one, are two-storied, often with a shop below and living quarters above.

For this painting I did not directly reproduce the colors recorded in the unexciting reference photo (below). Instead, I tried to convey the spirit of the building. I simplified the areas around and behind the building. I tried to contrast cool colors for the skyscrapers with warm colors of the building. Accordingly, I replaced the basic gray building color with a muted pinkish yellow — this is mostly an unusual combination of Daniel Smith Buff Titanium and Winsor & Newton Potter’s Pink, with a bit of Daniel Smith Goethite Brown Ochre in places. I like the overall color balance of this painting.

I have not worked much with hot press paper, but it seemed to suit this subject. (Also, the only hot press paper I have on hand — Portofino Magnani 1404 cotton, 140 lb., 8 x 8 in. — is square, and I decided to make the image square rather than vertical like the reference photo.) I can see why botanical illustrators like this paper, as it is good for detail. While I haven’t drilled down too deep in detail here (even so, the painting was time consuming), I like the assured quality of the ink lines on this smooth-surfaced paper. The ink is Platinum Carbon Black via a Platinum Procyon fountain pen (made in Japan) with a fine nib (probably the equivalent of a VF in most Western nibs; there is no industry standardization of fountain pen nibs). I know many artists get wonderful results from micron pens, but for me they lack soul compared to fountain pens. I typically begin with an ink drawing (based on Photoshop manipulation of the reference photo) and then add the color.

The reds are mostly a mix of Winsor & Newton Opera Rose and Winsor and Newton Cadmium Scarlet. The dark window glass is Daniel Smith Moonglow, while the blue frames are Daniel Smith Phthalo Blue. I think the teal sky is mostly Daniel Smith Cobalt Teal Blue and/or Winsor & Newton Cobalt Turquoise Light — the two paints are nearly identical. The greens are mainly a mix of Daniel Smith Perylene Green, Winsor & Newton Permanent Sap Green, and Daniel Smith Rich Green Gold, as best I can recall. Some people insist on mixing their own greens, but I am quite happy to have Daniel Smith or Winsor & Newton mix some for me. There are a bunch of other colors (especially in the lavender – magenta – purple range) as well.

I hope this watercolor conveys something of the charm of its Peranakan subject.

While recovering from pterygium excision surgery I made this crossword with a literary theme. It has a few more obscure answers or acronyms than I would like, but I’m told it’s not difficult. It’s hosted on the free crossword platform Crosshare and embedded here. It was time consuming but fun to do. My favorite part was the clueing.

Color wheels are fun, instructive, and beautiful. We owe their existence to Isaac Newton, as I discussed in a previous post. He realized that the extra-spectral colors—the range centered on magenta, between middle red and purple—could be used to connect one end of the spectrum of visible light to the other.

Extra-spectral colors do not appear when light passes through a prism because they are not produced by a single wavelength of light. But our eyes have the capability of combining multiple light wavelengths. When we observe a combination of the wavelengths at either extreme of the light spectrum—in such things as soap bubbles, oil slicks, hummingbird feathers, or bougainvillea flowers—our brains resolve what we are seeing into magenta and surrounding hues.

By using these colors to stitch together the extremes of the light spectrum, Newton created a circle in which colors face their complements—those that cancel them out to make white, gray, or black, depending on the medium—directly across the circle by means of a diameter through the center.

But Newton was primarily working with colored lightwaves. An artist’s mixing complements are different, due to the particular qualities of the pigments used in paints. “It is not possible to create a color wheel to summarize subtractive mixing complement relationships,” Bruce MacEvoy says, “because any single paint can be the mixing complement of several different paints on the opposite side of the wheel, and because two paints of the same color can have completely different mixing complements.” (Additive color begins with black and become lighter as color is added. Digital devices, for example, use electrical charges to cause red, green, or blue subpixels to glow, creating colored pixels. Paint, by contrast, can begin with a white page, which then progressively darkens as more color is added.)

Still, we can observe the visual relationships of paints around the color wheel, even if we have to rely on our experience with mixing paints to create true grays from them. So here we have the twelve points of the visual wheel of light, surrounded by chips showing the paints I currently have in my collection, placed in the appropriate position according to hue angle, as best I could determine it.

Hue is of course only one factor in how we perceive colors and their relationships. Physical paint qualities such as sheen, chroma (saturation), granulation, and value affect our perception of colors. Value refers to the amount of black or white in a color. It is primarily variations in value that create the striking apparent alternation of light and dark in the northwest corner (deep yellow through red orange) of the outer ring of this wheel (see the detail at the top of this post). To me the effect is like a succession of doors off a central courtyard, some bathed in light, others partly or deeply shadowed.

I created the inner circle in Photoshop. It represents the ideal conceptual color of twelve points on the color wheel. The primary triangle points on the inner circle are yellow, magenta, and cyan. Each is 100% of its color in CMYK mode. A secondary triangle in the inner circle is made up of red orange, blue violet, and green. The remaining six points are the tertiary colors, deep yellow, middle red, purple, middle blue, blue green, and yellow green. (K, or black, was always set to zero.) I’ve followed the naming convention used in Bruce MacEvoy’s handprint. 

In the inner circle, accordingly, secondary colors are 50% each of two primaries. Tertiary colors on 75% of one primary and 25% of another—for example, “red orange” is 50% yellow and 50% magenta, while “deep yellow” is 75% yellow, 25% magenta.

Having produced the inner ring in this way, I then printed the result on watercolor paper. Then, after painting the outer ring, I photographed and uploaded the result. This is an imperfect process, so the colors may shift on your viewing device, particularly since there is a range of color settings on different devices.

For any particular painting I typically use only a handful of colors, but this wheel shows all the ones I have available to choose from. Most artists favor the deep yellow through red orange range in their palettes, and such is the case here. It is especially so because I am fond of earth colors. I began with Winsor & Newton earth colors, which have proved to be workhorses, but I added many more from both W&N and Daniel Smith.

The physical wheel that I made on watercolor paper includes a pigment identification reference. There is also an Excel document that shows the hue angles and ratings for transparency, staining, granulation, and lightfastness for each—a sample section appears a few paragraphs up. Below is the complete wheel including text, and below that is a link to the Excel file as a pdf, which you should be able to download. Happy painting!

Excel paint qualities spreadsheet, as pdf.

The image above, by Lucas Cranach the Elder, features red, green, yellow, and blue colors. These colors were favored by Renaissance artists partly as a result of the pigments available to them, but also for theoretical reasons, as we shall see in a moment.

If you are like most people, you learned at a young age that there are three primary colors — blue, red, and yellow — from which all other colors are mixed. You can think about color that way, but it’s worth realizing that there is nothing magical, inevitable, or scientific about that color triad.

In fact, it is difficult to mix colors using blue, red, and yellow, which is why printers (who use the same pigments in their dyes that painters use in their paints) quickly gravitated to replacing red with magenta, a kind of red violet color, and blue with cyan, a sort of green blue. (Bruce MacEvoy asserts that “red and blue cannot be primary colors” because of intrinsic deficiencies in their wavelengths.) Along with cyan and magenta, the four-color CMYK printing process uses yellow and black, called the “key.”

While it is easier to mix colors with magenta than with red, magenta is an “extra-spectral” color — it does not appear in the rainbow of hues produced by passing light through a spectrum. That is because it does not correspond to a single wavelength of light but is a product of the way the multiple cones in our eyes respond to and combine red and blue-violet light (light that contains no green).

It was Isaac Newton who, in a real stroke of genius, bent the spectrum into a circle, connecting one end to the other via the extra-spectral colors. The resulting hue circle has the advantage, as Newton realized, of representing complementary colors as opposite points on the circle.

Artists were quick to recognize that Newton’s approach offered convenient guidance regarding color relationships, Newton’s breakthrough quickly caught on, and hue circles became commonplace, with hues related to the physical pigments used in producing colors.

Eventually artists and others who work with color developed a way of describing color that separates value (lightness/darkness) from chroma (saturation), and hue. Skipping over a couple of hundred years of experiment and argumentation (you’re welcome), we arrive at what is called CIELAB color, which Wikipedia describes as “a color space defined by the International Commission on Illumination (abbreviated CIE) in 1976. It expresses color as three values: L* for perceptual lightness and a* and b* for the four unique colors of human vision: red, green, blue and yellow.” This way of viewing color is based on the theory that we perceive color by processing signals from photoreceptor cells in an antagonistic manner (a theory first proposed in 1892 by the German physiologist Ewald Hering).

Regardless of which mode one selects when editing images in Photoshop or similar image-editing programs, when we adjust temperature and tint we are manipulating the image based on a four-color concept.

Which returns us to the Renaissance, where we began. In his Treatise on Painting (Trattato della peintura, a collection of notes and journal entries), Leonardo proposed that there were six primary colors: black, white, yellow, green, blue, and red. Black and white determine what is now called value. The other four colors relate to the post-Aristotelian view of basic elements. Yellow was associated with earth, green with water, blue with sky, and red with fire. But as it turns out, we have come full (hue) circle. The blue, yellow, and red triad that became color dogma in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has given way, and the red, green, yellow, and blue of Renaissance art again dominate advanced color theory.

The colors in this image were built up by glazing several light layers of color.

Ink and watercolor on paper, 11 x 14 in. Click to enlarge.

I’ve posted about this painting before, so I won’t repeat what I said about the process. I’m putting this up mainly so I have a place to link to the image without the accompanying blather, as a couple of instances have come up requiring that.

The ink is Platinum Carbon Black. I use fountain pens. To me, micron pens lack soul.

There are two triads of colors. Most of the painting is done with WN ultramarine blue (PB29), yellow ochre (PY43), and venetian red (PR101).

The second group of colors (also all WN) was used to mix the gold color, and the paints are applied in varying proportions. They are cadmium scarlet (PR108), burnt sienna (PR101), and yellow ochre (PY43).

Some comments about the process here.

Bruce MacEvoy, whose amazing handprint.com is the most extensive source of watercolor information on the internet, complains that while “these mechanical mixing variations certainly familiarize you with the potential range of mixtures any two paints can make … they may not help you overcome ‘color ideas’ or improve your perception of natural green colors.” (Below is a screen shot of a portion of the page where he discusses this.)

Jane Blundell, on the other hand, says that she has “created many watercolour mixing charts over a number of years that are very useful in my teaching and enabled me to be thoroughly familiar with my colours.” She sells these as a book via Blurb.

Tonya Lee of Scratchmade Journal produced a chart that is “about 20×20-inches, hangs beside my desk, and is a constant and reliable reference.” She sells it as “an in-depth resource that shares information and instructions for creating and using a variety of watercolor mixing charts.”

I mean, whatever floats your boat. Of course we have all done tests of how various colors mix, and this is a necessary activity. I’m sure extensive color charts can be invaluable in the hands of a person with the right temperament.

But I am mostly with Lundgren, who advises ignoring such charts. “Paint a lot,” he says “and you’ll learn how your colors work with each other.”

Which is fine, but the artist may still hesitate. Which blue is best, which red works best for this particular image? What I have found to be most useful are simple charts that can be held in one hand and used to remind myself of exactly what my unmixed colors look like. Once I pick my main colors for a project, I generally have an idea how to mix them to get the results I want, or I can do a test on a scrap sheet

The most convenient presentation I have found of my paints consists of informal swatches on 6 x 6 in. paper. With this size is it easy to hold the swatch sheet up to an image and judge which color selection is most appealing. I use Portofino hot press 100% cotton 140 lb paper for this. At present I have three such cards, one for yellows and reds, one for blues and greens, and one for earth colors. In the image below you can see these sheets next to the reference photo for a painting I’m working on. I was trying to judge which blue would be most appropriate for this image (I chose Winsor & Newton Indanthrene Blue, the second swatch from the top on the left of the blues-and-greens card.)

Ideal swatches include both the mass tone and the tint of each pigment, as these can be remarkably different. Currently, I have a chart of all my colors (of course, I am only likely to use a few in any given painting) that I often hold up to my work or its reference photo to help in choosing pigments. Swatches can indeed be a great time waster, but they can also be a convenient aid to visualization.

I’m generally pleased with the results of this recent painting — a rather large one for me at 11 x 14 in. I will comment briefly here on the palette and the process.

Palette

The palette is pretty traditional. The three main colors are ultramarine blue (PB29), yellow ochre (PY43), and venetian red (PR101). This is not unlike the so-called Velasquez palette. In addition, the gold color is mostly a mix of cadmium scarlet (PR108), burnt sienna (PR101), and yellow ochre. There are a few additional colors, such as the greens of the lampposts, a bit of cerulean blue in the sky and elsewhere, and so on, but these are minor. It’s not really a particularly bright palette, but brightness is conveyed by the juxtaposition of colors. The darkest areas are a simple mix of ultramarine blue and venetian red, in varying proportions — some are redder, some are bluer.

I have a process that I’ve evolved that I often (though not always) use. I’ve come to think of this as “my process,” though I don’t claim to have originated it. It’s just a way I’ve developed of working. Again, it combines ink and colors. Some watercolorists are condescending about the use of line with color. They say that line with color (“ink and wash”) can only be illustration and never fine art. This is nonsense, since ink and wash has a long and noble tradition, particularly in East Asia, but also in the West. I will have more to say about this in an upcoming post.

The steps of my process are the following:

• Artful photography
• Photoshop work, including conversion of image to line art
• Transfer of guide lines to watercolor paper
• Line drawing
• Coloring

Photography

Because I do a lot of travel photography, I prefer the lightweight bodies and lenses of the micro four thirds system. I currently use an Olympus OMD-EM5 mk ii body. I bracket my photos and often combine them into an HDR image, which I find helpful as a color and value reference (even though I often change the colors quite a bit.) I have written previously about my camera system. I began as a photographer, and I consider photography a key component of the artistic aspect of my process. I certainly make no attempt to hide the fact that I am working with photos. Rather, I am proud of the photographic aspect, as I have refined my photography skills over decades through thousands of images.

Photoshop

There are two parts to the Photoshop step. The first is to make reference photos. I usually print on heavyweight matte paper. I begin by eliminating any unwanted elements in the image and doing any other Photoshop manipulation that seems needed. For reference photos I do not make the same kind of image that I do for displaying art photos. Instead, working mainly with the Camera Raw filter, I like to increase the vibrance (not the saturation!) in the image and crank up the clarity. For presentation photos, the “texture” filter is usually better than the “clarity” filter because it is more natural looking. But for watercolor reference images clarity is great because it emphasizes edges, which is helpful for my line work.

Besides the main reference photo, I often also make blow-ups of details so that I can see better what is going on in the image.

Next, I make a line version of the image, which will guide me in my inking. I have found that the simple “find edges” function in Photoshop does not find the edges that I want. Instead, I use a multistep process that I have described before, which I have saved as a action that I can run with a single click. I lighten this line version of the image (most simply, with the levels function), and I often also convert the black to a light gray or blue. Below is the line guides image for a painting of houses on a canal in Bruges, Belgium (for some reason it looks a little darker after uploading — imagine very faint lines).

For comparison, here is the final painting:

Transfering the line image

Image transfer has an ancient history. The camera obscura, a mechanism that I think might have first been described by Leonardo da Vinci, is just one of many examples. I’ve used three methods for transferring the guides:

• A light table with the watercolor paper placed over the line art. Unfortunately, thick watercolor paper tends to be pretty opaque.
• Transfer paper, placed between the line art and the watercolor paper. The lines are traced with a stylus, depositing graphite on the paper. The nice thing about this technique is that the graphite can be erased, just like pencil marks.
• Printing directly onto watercolor paper. For this I use a Canon Pro-100 inkjet printer, which is the same printer I use for reference photos. It will accept thick paper, up to a width of, I think, 13 inches. This is a time and labor saver. You just have to make sure you’ve been thorough and judicious about preparing the photoshop line image.

Drawing the lines

I love fountain pens. I use ones with fine, extra fine, or fude (bent) nibs for my line work. Fude nibs allow line variation and filling of large areas. It is important to use waterproof inks. I use either Platinum Carbon Black or Rohrer & Klingner Lily, a dark brown. I used the Lily ink in the San Marco painting. If you use a dip pen you can use India Ink (it will ruin fountain pens).

Adding color

As any watercolorist knows, color is not just about hue but also about value. It can sometimes be helpful to make a black and white photograph of a painting to judge its values without the distraction of color.

This is the point where you hope you don’t screw the whole thing up at the last moment.

When I started painting with watercolors I researched available pigments and made a selection aimed at distribution around the color wheel (basically the spectrum of hue). The best single resource for this is Bruce MacEvoy’s handprint website, though I also consulted a number of other sources.

Of course, distribution around the color wheel is only one way of constructing a palette. (Distinction could also be made between a project palette and a collection of paints as a potential resource. My color wheel palette provides a good selection of paints from which to choose perhaps three of four as a palette for a particular painting.) Some artists prefer to work from a palette of primary colors, others like to have warm and cool versions of each of the main hues. Classical palettes of the 17th and 18th centuries emphasized earth colors, with a heavy emphasis on yellow ochre, raw umber, burnt sienna, ultramarine blue.

Watercolor artists, like those in other specialized fields, tend to have points of pride that might not occur to outsiders. Many artists scorn preliminary drawing or — heaven forbid — ink line work. Others insist that you should use no green pigments and always mix your greens from your yellows and blues. Fortunately, these prejudices are nonsense and can be ignored. Erik Lundgren, for example, in a post called Is Green Paint Unnecessary?, points out several uses for green pigments (“Green paint can be used for so much more than painting green,” he says. “It is a very good color to mix with others to achieve color tones that would otherwise be very difficult to achieve.”)

In any case, the color wheel palette has served me well, and it is still the bones of my system, although I have added several more pigments to fill gaps and just to play around with. My one requirement in choosing pigments is that they must be lightfast.

As for physical palettes for storing and mixing paints, I am not fond of pans (though I recently set one up for travel). Tubes seem to me more convenient. I do squeeze out colors into seven-bay palettes however. I prefer small, lightweight palettes that I can easily carry and move around. These palettes are used to store colors and bring them readily to hand. Some say that it is better to squeeze color directly from the tube, but I have not seen issues with rewetting dried watercolor paints. Working from palettes makes it easier to locate colors and is less wasteful than working straight from tubes (some watercolors are expensive), since unused unmixed color is always saved for later. (Still, for a large work with a limited palette like my San Marco painting shown below, I may squeeze colors directly from the tubes onto a porcelain plate for mixing.)

My colors are arranged by hue, and each is assigned a number (or letter for earth tones) for quick location on the palettes. For mixing, I have a small white porcelain plate that works very well.

I often work in an ink and wash style. Here is one of the first paintings I did, along with a more recent one.

For ink I use a fountain pen. Many line and wash artists use micron pens or similar, but to me these lack soul. I often use a fine or extra fine nib filled with Platinum Carbon Black fountain pen ink, which is quite impervious to water when dry—don’t spill it on anything that shouldn’t be black!—yet it won’t gunk up your pen. Other times I use a fude nib, which is bent at the tip,  enabling variation in line width. Recently I have been using a dark brown waterproof ink called Lily from Rohrer and Klinger, as in the San Marco image above.

I have twenty-eight colors in my basic starter set. Richeson makes a seven-well “flower palette,” which suits my purposes and means that four palettes will hold all my base colors. It’s made of “sturdy plastic that mimics porcelain” — a little cheap feeling compared to porcelain, but lightweight and probably good enough. I divided my colors among the palettes according to my color wheel. A nice feature of these palettes is that they stack without the bottoms touching the paint below.

When thinking about watercolors it is helpful to think in terms of the actual pigments used to create the colors rather than the names that the manufacturers give them. Pigments are identified by a combination of letters and numbers. These are industry standardized and printed on the tubes sold by major manufacturers,  Some colors are made of a single pigment and others are a blend of pigments. In general, single-pigment colors are better for mixing. Some say that colors get murky when they are made up of more than three pigments. I do have one color, Daniel Smith’s cadmium yellow medium, that is made up of three pigments, PY53, PY151, and PY 83, so according to the principle of limiting pigment mixes I should be cautious about using this in combination with other colors, but in practice it seems perfectly well behaved. Still, by default I favor single pigments.

Jump to: Palette One (yellows and reds) | Palette Two (red through blue) | Palette Three (blues & greens) Palette Four (earth tones)

A few thoughts on these colors:

PALETTE ONE (yellow to red)

1   Winsor & Newton Winsor Yellow (PY154 H3G, benzimidazolone yellow)

A light but intense warmish yellow that mixes well and is very light fast. More transparent than cadmium yellow. A popular alternative to Winsor Yellow  is the similar Hansa Yellow, which to my eye is a little cooler (greener). In fact, W&N describes Winsor Yellow as “part of the Yellow Hansa group of modern pigments.”

2   Daniel Smith Cadmium Yellow Medium (PY53, nickel dioxine yellow; PY151, benzimidazolone yellow; PY83, diarylide yellow HR)

A bright warm yellow tending slightly toward orange. Semi-transparent. Daniel Smith suggests mixing with Cerulean Blue. A nontoxic update on the traditional color. Daniel Smith has worked some sort of alchemical magic here. Despite being a blend of three different  pigments the color behaves perfectly well well in mixes and in washes.

2.1   Winsor & Newton New Gamboge (PY150, PR209)

New Gamboge is a transparent, warm, orangish yellow. The name comes from the pigment’s place of origin, Cambodia, (In a curious twist, the word Cambodia is derived from the Latin word for pigment, gambogium.) The pigment is derived from the resin of the garcinia tree. W&N says, “First brought to Europe in 1603, it was also used as a cure for rheumatism, high blood pressure and as a purgative cleanser. But as even a small dose it was lethal, it quickly lost popularity.” Winsor & Newton stopped its production of genuine gamboge in 2005 due to its toxicity. It was reformulated in 2005 and again in 2013. According to W&N, the new formulation is close to the original color used by Asian artists, as well as by Rembrandt, Turner, and others. It can be used to mix muted greens.

2.2   Winsor & Newton Winsor Orange (PO62, Benzimidazolone orange)

A semi-transparent, very intense orange. Good in wet applications. Artists such as Cezanne and Van Gogh favored orange in combination with blue–according to Van Gogh, “there is no orange without blue.”

2.3   Daniel Smith Pyrrol Orange (PO73, diketo-pyrrolo pyrrole orange)

This is a semi-transparent intense red-orange, darker than Winsor Orange. A similar color was a favorite of DaVinci. Bruce MacEvoy of Handprint says, “I have very high regard for this pigment; it is everything modern pigment chemistry should be. Provided you use the transparent single pigment brands, this makes a very versatile and reliable paint, worth trying for florals and other brilliant painting styles, and splendid as a warm, almost pinkish tint or blush color for caucasian flesh tones.”

3   Winsor & Newton Cadmium Scarlet (PR108, cadmium sulfoselenide)

Intense, opaque, very light-fast orange red.  According to Bruce MacEvoy, the W&N cadmium scarlet is “the farthest orange of any orange red [from PR108, cadmium sulfoselenide], a distinctive and very useful color,”

3.05 Daniel Smith Cadmium Red Medium Hue (PY53, PR254)

This one doesn’t appear on the color wheel, because it is a recent addition. I felt the lack of a bright red between Cadmium Scarlet and Perylene Maroon. Daniel Smith says that this formula is less toxic than the traditional cadmium red but has many of the same qualities — “Our hues are virtually identical in color to their namesakes, but cleaner in mixtures and stronger in tints.” It mixes quite well. It’s an extremely bold hue — a little goes a long way!

3.1   Winsor & Newton Perylene Maroon (PR179, perylene maroon)

A transparent, deep, dark red. A useful alternative to alizarin crimson, which is not at all lightfast. The W&N take on this pigment gives it a somewhat brownish cast.

PALETTE TWO (red to purple)

4   Winsor & Newton Quinacridone Magenta (PR122, quinacridone magenta)

It’s harder than you might expect to find a red that can be used to mix both satisfying oranges and purples. PR122 is one of the best. It’s s strong but semi-transparent, fairly dark, intense violet red.

4.1   Winsor & Newton Opera Rose (PR122, quinacridone magenta)

Somehow W&N makes this bright warm pink color from the same pigment as above. Bruce MacEvoy says that “It’s remarkable that the entire color span from middle red to red violet, formerly represented by a shoddy gang of fugitive organic pigments, has been handsomely replaced by different shades of a single modern and lightfast pigment: quinacridone.”

5   Winsor & Newton Cobalt Violet (PV14, cobalt phosphate)

Semi-transparent and very lightfast. This expensive pigment was introduced in the 1860s and was quickly adopted by artists such as Monet and Seurat. Joan Blundell says, “This gentle granulating pigment is often used in traditional English landscape palettes. Easily overpowered, but lovely with other quite pigments such as PY53 yellows and PG18 (Viridian).” Bruce MacEvoy says, “Although some artists disparage this pigment (Michael Wilcox calls it “gummy and weak”), genuine, high quality cobalt violet is a spectacular paint in broad wash applications — morning skies and magnified florals — and evocative in flesh tone shadows.”

6   Winsor & Newton Ultramarine Violet (PV15, sodium aluminium sulfosilicate)

A very lightfast, semi-transparent, rich purple. The W&N version of this pigment is bluer than that of some other brands. Does not mix very well with yellows.

7   Winsor & Newton Indanthrene Blue (PB60, indanthrone)

A deep, warm, transparent, lightfast blue, developed in the 1950s to mimic indigo. Raw umber is the complementary color. Eric Lundren emphasizes the pigment’s somewhat black aspect, while Tonya of Scratchmade Journal perceives some red in it. Jane Blundell says, “It makes wonderful greens with a range of yellows and is very effective for a night sky.”

7.1   Daniel Smith Ultramarine Blue (PB29, sodium aluminum sulfosilicate)

A lightfast semi-transparent, dark, intense violet blue (versions labeled “French” tend to be redder than ultramarines tout court). A modern replacement for the medieval artist’s favorite, lapis lazuli (which was worth many times its weight in gold). Good for mixing in the red direction, less so in the green direction. Eric Lundgren says, “If I could only have one blue color, I would, without a doubt, choose French ultramarine. It’s actually one of the most important colors for me”

8   Daniel Smith Prussian Blue (PB27,  ferriammonium ferrocyanide)

A lightfast, semi-transparent, intense dark blue. Prussian Blue was discovered by chance by a German chemist in 1704—until then artists were dependent on the extremely expensive lapis lazuli (mined in small amounts in Afghanistan) for dark blues. Unsurprisingly, it caught on, even spreading to Japan, where it was used by Hokusai. This is the blue of Picasso’s “blue period.” Bruce MacEvoy judges the Daniel Smith version to have “an exquisite subtle texture and good lightfastness.” Daniel Smith advises to “float this color into a moist wash to add variety to shadows.” Prussian Blue has to some extent given way in popularity to Phthalo Blue. This is probably a dispensable color in my palette, one that I don’t use a lot.

PALETTE THREE (blues and greens)

8.1   Winsor & Newton Cerulean Blue (PB35, cobalt tin oxide)

I’m not sure what to think about the fact that cerulean blue was nominated by Pantone in 1999 as the color of the millennium. Pantone explained that “Psychologically, gazing at a blue sky brings a sense of peace and tranquillity to the human spirit. Sky blue is imprinted in our psyches as a retiring, quiescent color. Surrounding yourself with cerulean blue could bring on a certain peace because it reminds you of time spent outdoors, on a beach, near the water — associations with restful, peaceful, relaxing times.” Tonya of Scratchmade Journal says, “when partnered in a painting with other blues like standard Cobalt (PB28) or Indanthrone (PB60) or when charged with a bold color likeQuin Violet or Rose (PV19), I think Cerulean lends a nice contrast and softening feature that I’ve yet to find in any other blue.”

9   Daniel Smith Phthalo Blue Green Shade (PB15:3, beta copper phthalocyanine)

A lightfast, transparent, intense blue. There are different flavors of Phthalo Blue. 15:1 is redder, this one is greener (though the Daniel Smith version is not as green as the one from Winsor and Newton). Mixes well with yellows and with Venetian Red. Daniel Smith recommends it “for cool, clean staining shadows and reflected light on windows,” which seems an oddly specific recommendation. This paint has a fairly large drying shift, turning lighter and less saturated. It’s highly staining (it can’t be lifted off).

10   Winsor & Newton Cobalt Turquoise Light (PG50, cobalt titanium oxide)

A lovely, delicate pale gree turquoise. According to Bruce MacEvoy, “The tinting strength is weak; the best mixing complements for cobalt teal blue are quinacridone maroon (PR206), pyrrole orange (PO73), pyrrole scarlet (PR255) or perylene scarlet (PR149); mixed with cadmium red (PR108) it makes a lovely warm silvery gray.”

10.1   Winsor & Newton Winsor Green Blue Shade (PG7, chlorinated copper phthalocyanine)

A brilliant transparent green with a blue undertone. Highly staining. A versatile color. With warm yellows this creates sap green. With ultramarine blue it makes nice teals and turqoises. It can be muted with crimson.

11   Daniel Smith Phthalo Green Yellow Shade (PG36, chlorobrominated copper phthalocyanine)

Transparent and super staining, lightfast, bright green. A bit intense to be used straight but useful in mixes. According to Bruce MacEvoy, “The best mixing complements are quinacridone rose (PV19). benzimidazolone maroon (PR171), and quinacridone carmine (PRN/A).”

11.1   Winsor & Newton Permanent Sap Green (PG36, chlorobrominated copper phthalocyanine; PY110, isoindolinone yellow R)

This is a dark, warm green with a yellow undertone. W&N explains that “Sap green is a lake pigment and was originally made from the juice of unripe berries from the buckthorn, (Rhamnus) plant. In medieval times the extracted colour was reduced to a heavy syrup and sold in pig bladders rather than a dry pigment.” The result was a color “about as fugitive as the grass stains fixed on the knees of your Levi’s.” Matt Harvey uses sap Green in portrait painting: “The one colour I can’t live without at the moment is sap green.… For me all skin tones seem to flow from there when this green is mixed with alizarin crimson or cadmium red.… If I mix Sap Green and a red for a shadow and it’s still too warm I mix in a bit of blue. It could be any blue but the blue I have on my pallet is Ultramarine.”

12   Daniel Smith Phthalo Yellow Green (PG7, chlorinated copper phthalocyanine; PY3, arylide yellow 10G)

A bright, transparent, lightfast, lime green. Paints such as this, according to Brucee MacEvoy, “appear to be approximately midway between unique yellow and unique green, much as orange is midway between yellow and red. I like them; they produce a wide range of green mixtures with all other paints, and interesting botanical browns and tans with reds or magentas.”

PALETTE FOUR (earth tones)

G    Winsor & Newton Payne’s Gray (PB15, phthalocyanine blue; PBk6, carbon black; PV19, beta quinacridone)

Payne’s Gray, introduced in the early 19th century by William Payne, is a dark blue grey, traditionally made from a mixture of ultramarine and black or ultramarine and sienna. It is a versatile neutral color, though I am tending more often to mix grays from complementary colors related to the image tone — Payne’s Gray can appear dull because of its extreme opacity. Jane Blundell has gone into some depth on the topic of mixing grays. However it is made, artists such as Rembrandt used plenty of grays, and the technique known as grisaille is based on it — the image’s shapes are laid out in gray and then painted over, the underlayer of gray providing shading. The painting known as Whistler’s Mother is actually titled Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1.

A   Winsor & Newton Yellow Ochre (PY43, natural yellow iron oxide)

One of the oldest pigments used by humans, yellow ochre  is a warm yellow color originally made from natural iron oxides found in earth.

B   Winsor & Newton Raw Sienna (PY42, synthetic yellow iron oxide;PR101, calcinated synthetic red iron oxide)

A nonstaining, transparent, neutral orange yellow. Bruce MacEvoy says, “The color of raw sienna resembles dried meadow grass, pale fresh cut woods such as maple or pine, and weathered plaster. I believe the Winsor & Newton formulation is closest to the historical color, which is slightly lighter valued, less saturated, cooler (more yellow), and much more transparent than yellow ochre” Jane Blundell says, “One of the special qualities of Raw Sienna is that it doesn’t really make greens when mixed with a blue so can be gorgeous in a sky as the warm yellow glaze above the horizon, with the blue above and no green!”

C   Winsor & Newton Raw Umber (PBr7,  natural iron oxide)

A dark, cool, semi-transparent yellow brown, Raw Umber was traditionally used in painting shadows. It creates warmer shadows that those of gray or black. It is an essential aspect of chiaroscuro painting, and was used by artists such as Caravaggio and Rembrandt to make highlighted figures appear to emerge from a dark background. Hieronymus Bosch used raw umber in the shadows of his triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights.

D   Winsor & Newton Burnt Umber (PR101, calcinated synthetic red iron oxide)

A semi-transparent, dark, warm brown. Roasting shifts the yellow hues toward orange, but the color is yellower than Burnt Sienna. The name is said to come from the Italian region of Umbria but more likely is derived from the Latin ombra, or “shadow.”

E   Winsor & Newton Burnt Sienna (PR101, calcinated synthetic red iron oxide)

Roasting makes the sienna a more reddish color. Bruce MacEvoy says the color “resembles bread crust, dark redwood, and suntanned caucasian skin.” Its complement is Ultramarine. Can also be mixed with Sap Green. In fact, its mixing possibilities are numerous. Jane Blundell says, “Mixed with a yellow it creates a yellow ochre and raw sienna hue, mixed with a blue it creates a myriad of greys, browns and deep blues and mixed with a red a wonderful range of neutralised red hues. Mixed with a green it can create a range of more mossy greens and very interesting neutrals with a purple — it’s a magic colour!”

F     Winsor & Newton Venetian Red (PR101, calcinated synthetic red iron oxide)           

A dark, dull, semi-opaque orange red, the color of rust. Can get quite opaque if applied too heavily. Complements Prussian Blue, and also works well with Cerulean Blue. Bruce MacEvoy says, “It is extremely effective at warming sap green and yellow mixtures, subduing intense yellow, orange or red paints, neutralizing blue and cyan paints, and producing a wonderful range of salmon, pinkish and pale flesh tints. Winslow Homer’s favorite black was mixed with venetian red and iron blue; it makes fabulous sky grays when added to cobalt blue.”  It’s stupid to talk about favorite colors. This is my favorite color.

I just finished Christopher Fowler’s Peculiar London, and now I want to go back to the city for another visit. It is a, well, peculiar book (though great fun for the right reader), seemingly random and meandering, with little differentiation between the grand and the trivial. The observations are presented as introduced by the detective Arthur Bryant and others of the author’s characters, though they all sound much the same. There’s a bit of a beginning & ending, but for the most part you could shuffle the chapters any which way with no one the wiser (sadly, the book lacks an index).

JOHN MAY: I’m finding this a little hard to follow, Arthur.

ARTHUR BRYANT: These are my notes. They’re in no particular order.

JOHN MAY: Clearly.

I can’t begin to summarize the copious and wide-ranging content, so I’ll quote the flap copy, which says the book offers a tour of “odd buildings, odder characters, lost venues, forgotten disasters, confusing routes, dubious gossip, illicit pleasures, and hidden pubs.”

I’ve met these characters before, and it’s hard for me to imagine the reaction of a reader encountering them for the first time in this context. Fowler says his agent’s first reaction was “Oh, it’s a Bryant & May book, just without the murder plot.” But when it comes to long books on London (it’s 475 pages), I find this one much more readable than Peter Ackroyd’s oh-so-serious London: The Biography.

An abiding interest in London may be a prerequisite to the book’s enjoyment. But how could you not be interested in London?

Can this be prevented? Using the same color profile for both screen proofing and print output can go a long way the ensuring that we’re not trying to print colors that are unavailable to us.

But it’s in the nature of printed images — especially when printed with ink as with most books and home printers but even with photographic (light-based) printing as well — to fill in dark areas. Analogy could be made to the discovery by early Renaissance printers that if counters — for example, the enclosed space in the letter e — were too small they would fill in and render the type less legible.

The best fix for this problem is to brighten the darks, generally from the darkest point up to the midtones. Fortunately, there is a simple way to do this, and it will make your printed images brighter and more vibrant. I do my post processing in Photoshop because I have long experience with that program, but similar processes are available in Lightroom & other applications. Here I will show the work flow in Photoshop.

Let’s start with this image, taken at Foz in Porto, Portugal. If we were to send this image to print, the tree at the right would likely turn into a solid mass of dull color. To fix this we will select the dark tones. In photoshop, you can do this by first control-clicking RGB in the Channels pallet.

That actually selects midtones through highlights, so we must inverse the selection.

Now add a curves adjustment layer in the layers pallet. Just add it, don’t modify the curve.

Change the layer mode to screen.

This will brighten all the darks in the image. The effect will probably be more than you want, so choose the amount of brightening by adjusting the layer opacity. I like to start at the left (zero opacity, showing the original image) and move the slider to the right until reaching the desired amount.

For this demonstration I have brightened the image more than I otherwise would, in order to better show the effect. Before printing I would probably darken the sky and the walkway a bit.

Here is a comparison of the original image, on left, and the image with the darks brightened, on right.

Here’s a detail to better show the effect of the brightening.

You can play with the amounts of the adjustments to get what works best for you. But your printed images will surely look better with this sort of adjustment. Have fun!