Sketching Palettes vs Triad Palettes

Reading Hazel Soan’s The Art of the Limited Palette and trying some triad paintings has given me a different perspective the colors that I reach for and the way that I think about my color library. The colors you choose for a walking-around sketching palette are somewhat different than the colors you choose for a triad.

Two ways of looking at colors

Sketching Palette

This is the way I build palettes for plein air, as well as seasonal and theme palettes (like my recent autumn palette). The fundamental assumptions are these:

  1. Your palette is a physical item that you take with you into the field, consisting of dry pans of some or all of the paints you own.
  2. For any given painting, you may use any/all of the colors in your palette to mix the colors you observe.
  3. In order to mix a color you observe, start with a similar color from your palette and adjust it as needed.
  4. The primary goal of color mixing is accuracy to the real world.
  5. The goal of your sketching palette as a whole is to maximize coverage of the color wheel and be able to mix as many specific colors as possible as quickly/conveniently as possible.
  6. If you have only room for 3 colors in your palette, they should be a primary triad. If you have room for more colors, fill in the steps in between (e.g. secondary or tertiary colors) spaced approximately equidistantly around the color wheel.
  7. Avoid duplication. When you add new colors to your palette, choose ones that are distinct from your existing colors. There is no point to having two colors that behave very similarly, or whose function can be approximated by other color(s) in your palette.
  8. Avoid adding colors that you can easily mix with your existing colors (e.g. premixed combinations of pigments you already own).
  9. Single pigment colors tend to be more useful than mixed colors because they reduce the risk of inadvertent duplication and maximize the number of distinct mixes you can make.
  10. Secondary colors may be just as useful as primary colors, as long as you have room, because they can get your closer to the specific color you want to mix.

Triad Library

Painted with limited palettes has caused me to reach for some colors I don’t normally keep on my sketching/walking-around palette. I’ve come to realize that being triad-oriented requires some fundamentally different assumptions about one’s color library.

  1. Your color library consists of all the paints you have access to, in any form factor.
  2. For any given painting, you will plan ahead and choose a limited palette (usually, but not always, a primary triad) selected from your library specifically for that scene.
  3. To build your limited palette, choose colors that allow you to mix the dominant color(s) in your scene. It’s okay if the rest of the colors are kind of off because they’ll still look harmonious if you use the same limited palette to mix all of them.
  4. Harmoniousness matters more than accuracy.
  5. The goal of your color library as a whole is to be able to mix & match a variety of different limited palettes/primary triads.
  6. If you have only 3 colors in your library, they should be a primary triad. If you can add more colors, add more triads.
  7. It’s okay to have very similar colors in your library (especially if they are blues, yellows, or reds) because they won’t be used together in the same painting, and there may be subtle reasons you want to choose one over the other for a specific scene.
  8. It doesn’t matter whether you can mix a color from other colors you have, since you will typically use them in different paintings.
  9. What pigment(s) your paints are made from doesn’t matter as much as their observed mixing behavior. A mixed pigment paint may still be used as one unit in a limited palette.
  10. Secondary colors are less useful than primary colors because they are far less likely to be able to behave flexibly in a limited triad.

Converting a sketching palette to a triad library

I’ve begun to realize that some of the colors in my most recent palette are actually not very useful in triads. I’m considering converting it to more of a triad library, while leaving my smaller pocket palettes for sketching and plein air. The process of converting from sketching type to triad type is basically just replacing more secondary colors with more primary colors. In my palette, it would look like this:

  • Orange-yellows to warm primary yellows (PY110 to New Gamboge)
  • Greens to yellows or blues (PY129 to PY150, PG36 to Phthalo Turquoise)
  • Light opaque blues to dark transparent blues (Cobalt Turquoise to Prussian Blue)
  • Neutrals to dark blues (Payne’s Gray to Indigo)
  • Violets to blues (Lavender to Ultramarine)

Room for both approaches

I think there is room for both ways of thinking!

A sketching palette, as you can tell from the way I named it, is still a convenient thing to have in the field when sketching outdoors. While having more triad-able colors on my sketching palette allows me to also try to do limited palettes outdoors, sometimes it’s easier to embrace convenience colors when time is of the essence. And sometimes my goal is literally just to color-match nature spots rather than to paint scenes, so color harmony isn’t really top of mind.

But keeping triad-friendliness in mind is great when considering additions to my larger library. Ironically the limited palette approach is encouraging me to add to my palette library because a wide-ranging selection of red(ish), yellow(ish) and blue(ish) paints create more options from which to draw the highly specific limited palette that comes closest to “solving” an individual scene’s limitations. It’s nice to have reasons to reach into the back catalogue and use some unusual paints – including getting to enjoy some old friends I had previously dismissed as “too similar to my existing palette colors,” such as Alizarin Crimson Quinacridone. I found myself using tube paints more often and exploring unexpected combinations that make painting planning feel like a pleasurable puzzle.

2 thoughts on “Sketching Palettes vs Triad Palettes”

  1. Wow, I think about sketching pallettes very differently!
    I think I’m less focused on color fidelity and more focused on the fact that my mixing space is limited, and so usually is my time. So my sketching palette is much, much more likely to include the convenience colors (greens, neutrals) that I usually mix at home. (To get color fidelity, I try to pack the sort of colors I will need )

  2. Working you’re working on tries, you may want to invest in Jane Blundell’s book

    https://www.blurb.com/b/10899724-watercolour-triads

    Or at the very least look at that part of her website.

    I’m currently halfway through her exploring watercolour course and think of a better way to discover what can be done with different sets of three colours – and that’s just 5 of the triads in the book.

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