The Sky Palette 

Skies are my favorite subject, and recently I’ve been painting a lot of them. It’s the perfect time to create a sky palette! 

Inspiration

Maria Coryell-Martin’s Cloudscapes Class

I took Maria Coryell-Martin’s one-day Cloudscapes class back in June 2022. Some color-related tips from that class, or from her palette:

• Violet-to-cyan blue sky gradients, e.g. Ultramarine Blue to Phthalo Blue GS.  
• Cloud grays mixed from primary triads, such as middle grays from Raw Sienna, Quin Rose, and Ultramarine Blue; or deep stormy grays from Burnt Umber, Deep Scarlet, and Indanthrone Blue. 
• Raw Sienna as a sky yellow, especially when peaking through gray clouds. 
• Using combinations of your sky blues and yellows to mix up simple green landscapes to give scale to the sky. No need for a palette green. 
• Using dark silhouettes to offset glowing skies. This suggests the use of a convenience black or gray, such as MCM’s choice of Graphite.
• Have plenty of blues.
• Why not have both Phthalo Blue shades? No need to choose!  

Maria Smirnova’s Sky Class

I took Maria Smirnova’s Realistic Skies on Skillshare in February 2023. She uses quite a different palette which is also interesting! Here are some color-related tips from that class.

• Smirnova relies on not one but two varieties of opaque Naples Yellow hue, both mixes of orange or scarlet, yellow ochre, and white. I would have assumed that transparent colors are better in the sky, but Smirnova makes a good case for opaque yellows/oranges, and achieves some subtle realistic dusk colors with them. 
• Ultramarine Blue for granulating cloud mixes or zeniths, with Bleu Sennelier (aka Phthalo Blue Red Shade) for the main clear-blue-sky color.
• A convenience dark blue is very useful for nightscapes. Smirnova uses Payne’s Gray, which is also useful as a silhouette color. 
• Have plenty of blue and orange-yellow. 

Ron Ranson’s On Skies

I enjoyed Ron Ranson’s book On Skies and found it inspirational for choosing more muted sky colors.

• In the book, Ranson starts every painting with a light wash of Raw Sienna.
• He uses a Cerulean Hue (Phthalo Blue/white mix) for blue skies.
• He makes cloud-shade grays from Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Sienna.
• Another gray/slate-blue mix is from Prussian Blue and Burnt Umber.
• He makes dusky mauve clouds from a mix of 90% Payne’s Gray and 10% Alizarin Crimson.
• He uses diluted Light Red for sunset cloud corals.

Brooke Morales 365 Skies Palette

Brooke Morales (@brookenoticed) painted a year of skyscapitos from the same window at 7:30 AM every day in 2023. Depending on the time of year, this may have included sunrise or a midmorning blue sky look. She used this 8-color palette:

• Bright, granulating blues for main blue sky colois: WN Cobalt Blue (PB28), WN Cerulean Blue (PB35), SH Cobalt Turquoise (PG50)
• Granulating gray clouds from DS Shadow Violet (PO73, PB29, PG18) and DS Payne’s Grey (PB29, PBk6)
• Warm touches from DS Buff Titanium (PW6:1) and DS Quinacridone Burnt Orange (PO48)
• SH Purple Magenta (PR122) for pink sunrise skies

I found it interesting that Brooke creates a warm, yellowish feeling not from yellow or even Raw Sienna, but Buff Titanium (a slightly beige white) and QBO (an orange).

Art Toolkit Skies Palette (Maria Coryell-Martin Again)

This is a 9-color Daniel Smith sky palette Art Toolkit put together inspired by Brooke Morales:

• Bright, granulating blue sky colors: Ultramarine Blue (PB29), Cerulean Blue Chromium (PB35), Cobalt Teal Blue (PG50)
• Dark night sky and gray mixers Indanthrone Blue (PB60) and Burnt Umber (PBr7)
• Earthy warm tone color Raw Sienna (PBr7)
• Sunrise and sunset colors: Hansa Yellow Medium (PY97) and Quinacridone Rose (PV19) 
• Lavender (PB29, PV15, PW6) for “mixing soft, foggy light” (seems sort of similar to the way Brooke uses Buff Titanium)

Palette Considerations

The sky can look different ways at different times of day and in different weather, so it was important to me to have a variety of color options.

Hue: Shades of blue are the first thing I think of for skies, but warm yellow and cool pink are also needed for sunset/sunrise, as well as a few earth tones for muting colors and mixing cloud grays.

Granulation: I tend to prefer nongranulating colors as a basis for sky colors (e.g. Phthalo Blue for a blue sky), to give the sky a smooth appearance. However, granulating colors are still really useful in a sky palette because they mix wonderful soft textured clouds. Some of the best and boldest blue sky hues are naturally granulating (e.g. Cobalts); in these cases I have chosen lower-granulation brands and typically mix them in with Phthalo Blue to reduce the textured appearance in blue skies.

Opacity: My initial feeling was that I wanted transparent colors to give the sky a luminous feel. Zenith blues in particular look great when they have a large value range and can make deep gradients. For other colors/purposes, I have found that on the first layer of a painting (which the sky usually is), opacity doesn’t matter much since you are not trying to see anything through it. For example, opaque yellows make perfectly good horizon-glow colors.

The Colors

1. Nickel Azo Yellow (PY150)

A very dispersive, very transparent yellow that’s useful for sunbeams. Mixed with TRO, it makes a Quin Gold hue. It also mixes well with QC to make orange and Cobalt Turquoise or Phthalo Blue GS to make bold Northern Lights greens.

2. DV Quinacridone Coral/Red (PR209)

As soon as I painted with this color (initially as Daniel Smith’s Quinacridone Coral, now as Da Vinci’s Quinacridone Red), I fell in love with it and knew it would be perfect for sunsets. Using Quin Red is one of my favorite sky secrets because it makes the crucial pinky-coral part of the sky the most vivid part of the painting. 

It’s also great to mix with Phthalo Blue RS for a slightly muted violet. For example, in the sky below, I used it both to mix the base violet sky color and to drop in unmixed as pinky soft dusk clouds.

Quin Red mixed with any yellow mixes the most bold, vivid oranges, even bolder than any single-pigment orange I know, which is why there’s no orange in this suggested color palette.

3. HO Quinacridone Magenta (PR122)

A bold magenta with a bluish tone, this is the perfect color for shockingly violet sunsets.

Small amounts, in dilute, can also bring in a bit of lilac glow to a sunrise. Combined with PR209, it can mix a Quin Rose hue.

4. DS Indanthrone Blue (PB60)

There are a few options for dark blue night skies, including Indigo, but I chose Indanthrone because it makes such wonderful moody cloud mixes when mixed with an earth color. 

5. HO Phthalo Blue Red Shade (PB15:1)

The all-around winner of What’s the best blue watercolor for the sky?, a wonderful smooth neutral royal blue.

6. DV Phthalo Blue Green Shade (PB15:3)

I went ahead and put in both phthalo blues! This greener cyan is perfect for daytime horizons and idealized, tropical-beach blue skies. 

7. HO Payne’s Gray (PBk6, PB15, PV19)

This transparent, blue-toned gray can look black in masstone, but is also capable of lighter tones.

Payne’s Gray is useful for darkening night skies or for diluting into cloud grays. It’s great for shadowy, backlit, semi-silhouetted subjects with a little bit of grayscale detail (though I’d generally recommend switching to Lamp Black gouache for flat black silhouettes).

8. WN Naples Yellow Deep (PBr24)

As an earth color denier, I’ve been surprised to find that a slightly muted, warm yellow gives me more glowing-looking results, and even seems to look brighter in a sunset context!

Naples Yellow Deep is great because it’s sort of halfway between a bold yellow and an earth yellow. It’s an opaque, buttery, orange-yellow: a subtle shade I find perfect for sunsets, especially in dilute. I previously avoided it because it is opaque, but in an underlayer that doesn’t matter.

Cool/lemon yellows were initially my choice in sky horizons, but I think the sky only ever looks “cool yellow” due to adjacency with blue. Warm yellows are closer to the actual color, and as a bonus, they tend to mix with blue in a “yellow and blue at the same time” way rather than the neon green way of cool yellows. 

I have also found it tempting to use brighter yellows, like the Hansas, but I think their brightness readjusts the realism level of the painting and paradoxically can make the end result look less bright. 

9. DS Monte Amiata Natural Sienna (PBr7)

Ron Ranson uses Raw Sienna as a the initial underwash for all his skies, but I has found my Raw Sienna to be a bit too orangey and I prefer to use a more yellowy earth color like MANS. It’s great for the color of light peeking through dark clouds.

While similar in hue to Naples Yellow Deep, MANS is a bit browner and lightly granulating. Aside from being a lovely underwash, it’s also wonderful in cloud mixes as it gently warms grays without making them garish or muddy.

10. DS Transparent Red Oxide (PR101)

Although skies aren’t generally burnt orange, this color is a great mix-in to neutralize blues and create cloud grays.

DS’s version of TRO is very granulating, which can be interesting in clouds. For a smoother version, consider DV Burnt Sienna Deep. Brooke Morales uses Quin Burnt Orange, which I find tends too green in blue mixes for my purposes, but she uses it to great effect to add warm glazes to sunrise skies.

11. DV Ultramarine Violet (PV15)

So many cloud shadows look to have a flash of violet in them to me, and while it’s possible to mix this with Quin Magenta and Ultramarine Blue or another blue, I find that Ultramarine Violet gives me my favorite gentle, consistently granulating results.

A fairly weak color, this can be dropped into any mix to add granulation and cool violet tones without overpowering.

12. DV Cobalt Blue (PB28)

Another wonderful all-arounder for blue skies! Cobalt Blue can serve as either the zenith or the midtone or the only blue sky color, depending on the effect you want to achieve. It also mixes some of the loveliest violets I know, and is capable of a wonderful gentleness in mixes.

I removed Cobalt Blue from my palette for awhile to test having a nontoxic palette, but I’m happy to have it back. The hue is similar to Phthalo Blue Red Shade and the mixing capabilities are more similar to Ultramarine Blue, but to be honest, I think I would choose Cobalt Blue if I had to pick one of the three. Cobalt Blue is a better mixing chameleon, where Ultramarine Blue tends to stand out and steal the show.

13. SH Cobalt Turquoise (PG50)

An extremely bold, opaque, bright turquoise, this is a staple of my Neon Palette. It is a specialist for bright, bright horizons.

This is another color that I removed from my palette during the nontoxic experiments, but I really enjoy it so it’s a nice friend to welcome back. But this one is much more of a specialist for which I have fewer use cases, so it’s a “nice to have.”

14. HO Titanium White (PW6)

White is a much-maligned color in watercolor but I often find that I want it when painting skies on location, particularly for mixing with granulating sky blues. It makes them smooth as well as pastel. It can also be helpful to add chalkiness to heavy clouds.

White allows you to mix up your own versions of popular sky colors like Cerulean Hue (Phthalo Blue + white) or Lavender (UMV, UMB, white).

Strong Maybes

I considered putting in these colors and didn’t, but they’re also good options:

• Ultramarine Blue (PB29) has got to be my most controversial omission. It’s such a classic sky color, both for blue sky zeniths and cloud mixes. In gouache, I would never leave it out, because it mixes such a wonderful blue-sky hue with white (and perhaps a bit of Phthalo Blue). But in watercolor, it is such a color-separating show-stealer that I find it can be a poor team player. Cobalt Blue has a similar hue and is more flexible in mixes. For me personally, Ultramarine Blue a bit of a liability for a sky palette, as I tend to overuse it when it is available.
• Cerulean Blue Genuine (PB35) is also a classic sky color (cerulean means sky!), but I find it too muted and granulating for the blue-sky purpose; again, I prefer a light wash of Cobalt Blue. My favorite use case for Cerulean Blue is actually mixing grays with Indian Red (PR101), which is certainly a nice cloud option, but I had enough colors here which do double-duty and also mix gray that I didn’t want to add one that I only prefer for clouds and that would always tempt me for skies (but not please me as much as the other blues).
• Phthalo Turquoise (PB16) and Alizarin Crimson Quinacridone (PV19) make my favorite mauve mix, but as with Cerulean Blue and Indian Red, it was tough to find two slots to make one of my favorite mixes. I could have bumped PBGS for Phthalo Turquoise, but red just looks weird in a sky palette. Phthalo Turquoise is also not as useful as PBGS for bright blue skies because it’s darker and more muted, though it is better for night skies.
• Dioxazine/Carbazole Violet (PV23) is a smooth alternative to Ultramarine Violet that mixes a nice deep zenith violet-blue with Phthalo Blue GS. My hesitations about this color are its extremely intensity (making it too easy to overpower cloud mixes) and its drying shift (making it difficult to judge the right value and hue when wet).
• Indigo, typically a mix of Phthalo Blue and black, is a very dark and muted dusk/night-sky blue. It’s just too similar to Payne’s Gray, and anyway can be mixed by adding a bit more Phthalo Blue to Payne’s Gray.
• Quin Rose (PV19) is really convenient for sky pinks though I found that the combination of PR209 and PR122 mixed a similar color while allowing a wider range of hues.

Conclusion

This palette contains many of my all-time favorite colors, likely because I am such a fan of painting skies! It’s also a flexible palette that can be used for many purposes, particularly with the inclusion of Nickel Azo Yellow for mixing greens, which are mostly unnecessary in the sky but useful for landscapes.