 Why hello there and welcome to my YouTube channel. My name is Sandy all knock I'm an artist and today I'm gonna be talking about watercolor and my Overhaul of my palette for 2024 now. I'm not talking about the physical palette This is still my 18 color palette from House of Hoffman. It's the colors in it that have changed pretty radically I've swapped out eight out of 18. That's almost half of my colors are new 2024 a little bit dangerous, but it's been a long time coming Now, how do I know it's time to change out the palette if you start noticing that you have not refilled particular wells of color very often whereas you've refilled the others quite often Maybe just maybe that color is not carrying its weight And I have a number of colors in my palette that are not and there's also some things I wanted to fit into my palette Particular kind of yellow and I needed to get rid of something else to do that So different colors got voted off the island. Sorry to them. There are two things I want to ask of you before I get started one is Don't be that person on pretty much every palette video Who feels the need to say, oh, that's a terrible choice. Why did you put that color in your palette? A person's choices are a person's choices The best recommendation I can make is to subscribe to that person's channel and watch what they paint with that color You might learn something that that is actually a good color in certain uses or certain combinations Which is a reminder you might want to subscribe to this one because I have eight crazy colors coming The second thing I would like your help on is getting some suggested color combinations One of them should be one of the new colors And then the other ones can be whatever colors you think you'd like to see with it And then I'll do a series of paintings in the next month or two With different color combinations Focusing on each one of my new colors So I can explain more than I am in this video in depth What I see in it what I want to explore with it And then create a painting with it as well So leave your suggestions in the comments down below So giving you that heads up before we get started in case you need pencil and paper At the end of this video, I'd like to share a few tips on how you can develop your own palette As well as how your palette helps to develop your voice as an artist So hang around for that. Let's get started swatching Whenever I refer to the big palette, that means this house of Hoffman palette And I have it set up so it's yellows then reds a brown some blues greens and then more neutral colors Including my pain's blue gray, which you see a lot of times around here But I am going to be Swatching out this palette and I took the colors that I'm Removing and put them in a row above just for my own record. So I remember what came out Let's begin with the yellows. I have kicked sadly Oriolan to the curb And I wanted to replace it with something special And so I was trying to vote one off the island the two that stayed Are hands of yellow light and new gambos a warm and a cool These two colors mix well with my blues and my greens to make all different kinds of greens for my landscapes And I also can mix them with the reds to get oranges Lots of different things I can do when I have a cool and a warm in the palette So definitely have a cool and warm yellow The yellow that I ended up switching to was going to be nickel azo You might know my love of nickel azo and the bursting things that it does But the base color is kind of poopy This one is indian yellow and it has a nicer base color to it But it has some of the same bursting types of things that it does and I was excited to see that It's gonna be playing with it In lots of different ways in the future I want to do a whole video just on that color To talk about it more And then this is my You know my same old yellow ochre. I always have yellow ochre in my ballots Here's some of the yellow tests that I had done and you can see there's a value difference in a couple of the yellows, but the Indian yellow and the nickel azo have more value difference So I can get a little more color if I use heavier pigmentation And the color the base color for indian yellow is just much nicer And I I don't like and wouldn't paint with nickel azo on its own But I would use the indian yellow So this one is an indian yellow couple of tulips You can see the slight difference you can get from that and you can force that to be much Stronger same with these yellow flowers The other ones I had to work really really hard to try to get the paint thick enough to do what indian yellow can do naturally. So That's why I chose it I made a pretty big shift in my reds I've had anthraconoid scarlet in my palette for eons and decided it would go as well as permanent alizarin crimson And the permanent alizarin crimson was just never a go-to For whatever reason even though I know it mixes with certain things to make certain colors It just was not a color that I was drawn to so I Evicted it and it replaced it with pyrrole crimson We'll see if that does me any better because there were some things that I liked in my tests that You know, maybe it will draw my attention more And keeping my quinacridone rose for those soft pinks and And flowers that sort of thing Need to have a little bit of that bright color But the color that's going to sit in between them instead of anthraconoid is permanent red deep Now both of these new reds are medium staining Which makes me nervous because I don't like having this many staining colors in my palette But the things that it did on the paper were quite exciting to me Because I've never been happy with a painting of a rose necessarily a red rose with any of the colors I've ever painted because They just looked kind of dead The color just dries a little bit dead And that is by the way my transparent red oxide which sits next to the reds and You know, it sits right in that spot for a particular reason. I'll tell you about a minute But the red tests that I did you can see a bit of a difference and probably more in reality than in video The one on the right is the new colors and it's just brighter colors The roses that I painted there are with the new reds Whereas I get a little bit warmer color and a little deader color with the anthraconoid And then as soon as I switched over to the permanent red deep with the pyrrole crimson I was just much happier with that And I'm going to have to paint some roses and see how I like it It does mix to be a really dark Which is one of the things I used to use alizarin crimson for the few times I did use it So still have that My blues had a complete overhaul and an addition. So starting off with cobalt blue coming out and french ultramarine coming in Partially because I had three tubes for some reason a french ultramarine in my box and nothing in the cobalt So I'm going to try it a lot of artists will use this for mixing their neutrals with a brown And I'm going to try it and see and use up this paint that's here And the next color is jewel chrome cabo blue Which is one of those colors that has some shimmer to it And using it thickly it will do that but you can also drop it into some Really rich dark colors when making say a galaxy and it'll burst out in similar ways that indian yellow will do And i'll be showing you that in coming weeks The color that i'm replacing cobalt blue with some of the things I liked cobalt for Is verditer blue. It's such a traditional blue like look at that blue Look at that bird. It is the perfect blue for that There's a lot of things that verditer blue does gorgeously like look at this sky I just put painted water in there and then dropped color in I love this color. It's got a little bit of granulation to it But it's just really really nice. So here's Using my different blues together. I wanted to see how they'd work together that kind of glowing blue is the Dual chrome cabo blue on the edges. You see some of that bright verditer Goes into some of the ultramarine and then the ultramarine goes in here in the the darkest parts with some paints blue gray I like these colors I'm wanting to paint more seascapes and waves because all of my ocean paintings sold in 2023 So that is a sign. Maybe I should do more And then there was some other testing of colors. I was mixing everything with all the different colors on my palette I also did a lot of tests In reality to see what a sky looks like in all the different blues that I was considering There was some that had just some issues in the the painting the physical painting Um, I don't like the mess that I feel like I get with cobalt teal blue. I love the color But the granulation just feels messy in a painting But king's royal blue is a lovely color. I liked it a lot But it just has these spots where the pigment collects and I could not seem to paint with without doing that So that's where verditer blue came in and rescued me Cerulean blue is beautiful and I can get some lovely edges, but it just has again Ridiculous amounts of granulation. It's not something that I enjoy In my paintings and who knows maybe I'll change my mind someday But that's kind of how I test in real life situations rather than squares of color Two greens got voted off the island And one was green gold because I can mix sap with the yellow to get a green gold And the other was green appetite, which has not seen much use And if it hasn't seen much use lately, it's time for it to make room for something else on my palette I'm keeping two staple greens Cascade green and sap green one is more of a blue green and the others more of a traditional green And I know there are artists who hate these two colors Because they're just so quote unquote boring But I just want to tell you if the color works for you if it mixes well with the other colors you use Just use it ignore those people who tell you something is a You know a terrible color or whatever Okay, ultramarine turquoise. I'm going to talk a little bit more about and show you a little demo in just a minute This chromium green oxide or chromium oxide green. I can never remember exactly what it's called But this color is opaque. I have no opaque colors in my palette But it's got some really fun things that I want to explore with it Lots of this chromium oxide color is in The landscapes. I'm going to show you these greens Which are kind of dull and yet life like I mean they they just look more realistic to me This one has a lot of the chromium green in it mixed with some yellows to get those brighter colors And then the mid tones are almost the the chromium green by itself And there's just something about the light that I can capture with this color And the way it mixes with other things that I'm really interested to see how it works I don't know what I'm going to do with its opacity. That's just something I'm going to need to play with and explore This one also has a bunch of that chromium oxide in it They wash across the grasses has a little bit of yellow in it and it's just a real thin wash But back there in that center portion in that hillside is more of what that color looks and feels like Uh, just really really interesting The grasses here in the foreground also has some some of the chromium oxide mixed in it And I just like how it's kind of a tamp down green The opposite of uh, tamp down color is ultramarine turquoise really bright really strong And I wanted to see what the range was how light will it go how dark will it go and it gets pretty intense But it's not a staining color. I like that about it. It's got a bit of granulation to it just a wee bit And it's more Greenish than my phthalo blue turquoise. So I get a little bit more of a turquoise flavor Rather than the blue turquoise felt very blue This one has a really great variety in terms of going from really light to really dark So I like having that option it mixes really nicely with my verditer blue To give me that under color in the wave that that kind of deep turquoise And then it gets even deeper when I mix that in With some of the ultramarine blue or a little bit of paints blue gray to just deepen those colors I like the way that these play together So that's something I want to explore But I'm open to other turquoises because I tried a few others and this one for right now has my attention I just want to give it a try for a while and do some more of these seascapes And see what happens see what I can create in terms of color Using it the last section of my palette is not new colors But I'm calling them heroes could have been miscellaneous But I'm going to call them heroes to show them some love One is pains blue gray which serves as a black for me I don't like using regular old black in a palette really And I can mix that to be a black if I need one The other two in this section are lunar blue, which is a beautiful color as is moon glow Both of those colors are highly granulating there. I consider them specialty colors I don't use them in a lot of my day to day stuff I've done entire paintings in those two colors and They are like value studies because they go from super super light and bright to deep dark almost black These hero colors look just about the same on a swatch sheet Like there's very little difference between them They're really different paints and they perform completely differently. That's why I never trust swatch sheets like this I made this just for you for this video I like to actually paint in context to make sure that the paint is going to do what I want it to do When I was painting all of those sample paintings, I was testing to see how does it drop into water What happens when I drop it into wet pigment? What happens when I drop it into thin wet pigment versus thick wet pigment? I mean, I'm looking for lots of different things out of my paints But just making a block of color doesn't really help in deciding what's going to be in my main palette I want things that are going to Have certain properties in them And one of the things I was looking for in a lot of my paints Is having a value range And I was testing out value range Because that's important to me something else might be important to you And I recommend that you actually paint in context Because that's going to help you to see what your colors are going to do when you actually paint with them Now why do you need a curated palette or a main palette? Not your 60 well palette Not your 48 well palette Not your 36 well palette I mean a 12 to 18 color palette And for the truly needy you can go up to 24, but please limit your colors As an artist you need to have a set of colors that you will grow with As long as you have 17 different greens to choose from you will never be forced to try to mix the right green That you need for that painting at that moment And I know it might sound like eating your vegetables But I really believe you need to learn color mixing Even just simple color mixing Using a simpler set of colors a warm and a cool in each of the primary colors As your basis start with that And grow from there add yourself some treats some of your favorite colors or your your colors that have particular properties And then work with those things for six months a year stay with those colors for a while Then as you find that there's certain colors you're not using or certain colors You're always reaching out to that extra palette for Then you can add those in and get rid of something you haven't used There's another side benefit that I discovered when I switched to having a smaller main palette And you may find it as well Which is that I started seeing more commonality in my work And my voice as an artist has started to develop I'm not there yet. I haven't arrived But I'm starting to see those common things that make my work mine And a lot of it is because I have curated my colors They express me as an artist your colors will express you as an artist So when you make those choices, it's going to affect your work I'm a little scared about the color choices that I've made And am I going to undo any learning that I've already had about who I am as an artist? I have no idea What I'm going to find out the only way to find out is to try it So hopefully you'll stick around with me on this journey And maybe together we'll discover what our voice is as an artist and how to even take steps toward that Thank you so much for visiting with me I will see you again when I'm going to show you all of the new Daniel Smith wash colors So a little more swatching coming a little more painting coming I will see you then don't forget to add your three color combinations in the comments And I'll see you again very very soon. Bye. Bye