how my mind works

On Monday I wrote a blog post about putting together this almost neutrals only palette after seeing a similar selection of colors on a previous post on Suhita Shirodkar’s Instagram feed. I played around with this palette a bit, exchanging one primary color for another. Currently this one has pyrrol scarlet instead of Suhita’s transparent pyrrol orange and cerulean blue chromium instead of her cobalt blue. I often use the back pages of my journal to test pens and paints. But I missed my wee Demi Palette!

And I was once again distracted by another artist’s limited palette. Róisín Cure recently posted what she calls her “Extreme Limited Palette” of only 4 colors: indigo or Payne’s grey, burnt umber, yellow ochre, and Venetian red or transparent red oxide. I copied the above sketch from Róisín’s blog but can’t find the direct link to it any more.

So I combined the basic ideas of both palettes, tweaked my color choices once more, and switched them to my Demi Palette. The lower row has my version of Róisín’s colors — instead of burnt umber, I mixed transparent red oxide and indigo; this can be tweaked by either to be more brown or more gray. My red is now lunar red rock and my 2nd blue is cobalt turquoise, an unusual choice but it’s made of the same pigment as cerulean blue chromium and I just love it! I added 2 pans of titanium white gouache — one for mixing and one to stay clean for highlights. This set will definitely be fun in a toned paper sketchbook!