I used this trio during my advent calendar, when I drew Maimeri Blu’s Mars Brown (PR101) for the day’s pick. To show it off, I painted a song sparrow, with the Mars Brown used in the red slot of a triad – pairing it with suitably earthy Monte Amiata Natural Sienna and Cobalt Blue.
Color Wheel
Another thing I tried out for the first time: a triad template, designed by Lisa Spangler for Art Toolkit! I got the small version so it would fit in my drawers. It’s about 3″ across. This is shown on the left below.
The idea of triad template is that you paint solid colors in the small spaces, with gradients between them to show mixes. This was effective at showing the granulation of the Mars Brown, but in terms of showing what types of mixes are possible, I actually didn’t find this as useful as my normal method painting fully mixed dots. So on the left, I ended up using the template as a circle to paint dots around!
I dropped mixes of all three colors into the middle, with the one on the left randomly being more saturated.
THis is a great triad for granulating, earthy browns and grays. You can’t exactly get typical secondary colors, as the blue and earth yellow don’t make green, and a brown is used in place of a red so orange and purple are also not super possible. But you can get orange-tinged browns and violet-tinged grays.
Painting
A song sparrow on a wooden post was the perfect subject for this triad since it requires a variety of shades of brown and gray. The stripes on the song sparrow’s face were basically the exact color of unmixed Mars Brown, which was really convenient. For the background I couldn’t resist just dropping in abstract splotches of the component colors, though a blue sky might also have been nice.
Conclusion
This was a great triad for the subject. A simple swap of Mars Brown for a redder PR101 (e.g. Transparent Red Oxide, Indian Red, or Venetian Red) would expand the color wheel considerably while keeping the earthy, granulating, moderate-chroma feel of the trio.