Artist Palette Profiles: Katie Woodward

Katie Woodward (@ramblingsketcher) is a New York City watercolor artist who authored Understanding Light in the Urban Sketchers Handbook series. She also does one of my favorite Instagram video series, Random Palette Mondays, where she draws three random colors (one from a “red” bag, one from a “yellow” bag, and one from a “blue” bag, but interpreted loosely) and paints a pre-selected scene from the resulting triad. It’s a great series because she shows how a wide variety of triads can be used to create unexpected results.

I recently took a Zoom class on color with Katie, where she explained her process for the Random Palette Mondays and what she learned, and led the class through a palette mixing exercise to evaluate and find the right colors for you. Some cool things she emphasized:

• You don’t have to match the hue you see in life. “Accuracy is an illusion anyway,” she casually tossed off, mindblowingly.
• The same color will read different ways depending on context. For example, she showed a brown that read as red when placed next to green in a painting. Things don’t have a color, they have a color context, which depends on their relationships with other colors around them.
• There is something to be said for convenience. Some artists advise having the brightest colors to give you the most options (you can always mix more muted but not more bold), but Katie found that she often preferred working with palettes that had already-muted colors so it was less work to mix.
• Choose colors you love. Since you can bend pretty much any scene to be painted with pretty much any color, you might as well use the colors you personally like.
• Choose colors that you enjoy working with. Any color that gives you trouble (too hard, too sticky, too weak, too streaky, etc.) is an easy cut. The experience matters more than the result.
• There is no one answer to “which color(s) are best?” There may be reasons you choose one color over another for a particular location or context, but if you are frequently choosing between two very similar colors, it might be time to decide which one you personally like better for your own personal idiosyncratic aesthetic or experiential reasons, and simply cut the other. TBH it doesn’t really matter: nearly anything can be made to work in the context of any specific painting.

All things I needed to hear! I have a tendency to get fixated on which colors will give me the most hue options, but I’m not a printer being judged on accuracy. People aren’t generally comparing an artist’s painting with the reference anyway (except when we invite them to), what matters is if the painting works on its own terms; and it is actually more likely to when the artist has chooses colors they like instead of colors that are exactly the same as real life.

Katie’s Palette

Katie Woodward is definitely someone who has a large back catalogue of colors and who tends to choose a limited palette for an individual piece, so “her palette” is sort of a loose definition, but here are the 12 colors she demo’ed in class.

Slot	KW Has
Warm Yellow	DS New Gamboge
Orange	Qor Transparent Pyrrol Orange (she also praised DS’s)
Red	DS Pyrrol Red
“Warm Magenta”	DS Quinacridone Coral (I often call this a warm red but she called it a warm magenta and… it definitely is, in terms of how it mixes)
Red-Violet	Qor Quinacridone Violet
Blue-Violet	DS Cobalt Blue Violet
Blue	Qor Cerulean Cadmium
Dark Blue	DS Indigo
Turquoise	Qor Cobalt Teal
Green	DS Cascade Green
Gold	DS Rich Green Gold
Warm Gold	DS Quinacridone Deep Gold
Sienna	DS Quinacridone Sienna

As you might expect from a color experimenter, this is an offbeat palette with some choices that clearly reflect a personal preference (esp. for quinacridones) over the traditional choice (e.g. more saturated Quin Sienna instead of a traditional Burnt Sienna; no specific earth tones, but also not the brightest possible colors). Conspicuously absent are some of the colors I’ve come to identify as nearly everyone’s palette staple, such as a middle or lemon yellow; “true” magenta; earth yellow; and Ultramarine Blue. In fact, in class we had a whole discussion about whether you need Ultramarine Blue (Katie: Absolutely not if you don’t like it, don’t have any colors you don’t like!)

Conclusion

Katie has given me a lot to think about challenging conventional palette wisdom. There are many ways I don’t want to emulate her palette, and that’s fine! She is the fiercest advocate for making your palette choices purely on personal aesthetic choices. Her demonstrations of great paintings she made with the most absurd triads really drive home the point – well, first, that she’s really good at what she does, but second, that nearly any color can be made to work in a painting so just pick what you want to use!