Jill Gustavis is a watercolor artist from Western Massachusetts. On Instagram, she did a 100 Days project where she painted with different triads, which is definitely interesting to me with my newfound interest in limited palettes. She has some great blog entries; I’ve read her post, Magic Happens When You Repeat Paintings, several times. I don’t usually like repeating paintings, but she makes a great case for exploring, and I love every iteration of her example.
Artist Palette Profiles
Artist Palette Profiles: Hazel Soan
As a big-palette enthusiast, I really need practice with limited palettes, which is where Hazel Soan’s 2022 book Art of the Limited Palette comes in. In the book, Soan extols the joys of using a limited palette – how it can make your paintings look more color-rich, less muddy, and more harmonious, while also making your life easier as a painter.
What makes this book convincing is how much I love use of color in Soan’s paintings in the book. Is this because she uses limited palettes, or because she’s generally good at painting? Hard to say, but her limited-palette paintings certainly don’t appear to be limited in hue or value. On the contrary, they seem to glow and vibrate with color!
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.
Artist Palette Profiles: Poppy Balser
I recently started a series of classes with Poppy Balser, a celebrated Canadian artist based on the Nova Scotia coast who works in oil and watercolor. Balser uses a very limited palette!
Artist Palette Profiles: Shelley Prior
Shelley Prior is Canadian artist from Burlington, ON whose skies I really admire! She creates glowing, luminous cloudscapes. She lists her palette on her Materials page.
Artist Palette Profiles: Mike Daikubara
Mike Daikubara is an urban sketcher based in Charlotte, NC and the author of Sketch First, Think Later and Color First, Ink Later. Sketch First, Think Later encourages you to get out and sketch quickly with a minimal kit; Color First describes a slightly more involved, wild style where you put down layers of dripping color to capture light and shadow and color interplay, then draw ink lines and details after it dries. I enjoyed both books, though the Color First method seems a bit advanced for me!
Today, I’m going to talk about Mike’s palette as described in Color First.
Artist Palette Profiles: Zoltan Szabo
Zoltan Szabo (1928-2003) was an evocative landscape watercolorist, prolific workshop instructor, and author of dozens of books. Today, I’ll be looking at his 1998 book Zoltan Szabo’s Color-by-Color Guide to Watercolor.
Artist Palette Profiles: Molly Hashimoto
Molly Hashimoto is the author of Colors of the West: An Artist’s Guide to Nature’s Palette, an art book based on National Parks in the American west, and Birds of the West, which showcases her watercolor and block print bird art. I love her bright, clear, intense colors and joy in nature.
Artist Palette Profiles: Paul George
Paul George is a landscape artist from Massachusetts who shares oil and watercolor painting tutorials on Youtube. After reading about it on Laura’s Watercolors in early February, I tried his Essex Saltmarsh tutorial. It was fun, and I found I didn’t have to make that many color substitutions! I then looked up his video on his palette. I’ve done my best to recreate it from my collection below.
Artist Palette Profiles: Albrecht Dürer
I’m going way back in time for this one – back to the 1400s! We’re looking at the palette of Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). This has got to be the earliest palette I’ll be able to identify.
InThe History of Watercolour, Marie-Pierre Salé considers Dürer the “first watercolorist,” not because he invented watercolor (people have been painting with pigment suspended in water since cave painting days), but because he’s one of the first Western artists known to have used the medium to its fullest for works of art (rather than incidental illustration of illuminated manuscripts and so forth). Dürer created landscapes and incredibly detailed natural history paintings.
So what was in his palette? What pigments even existed then??