In My Watercolor Palette

Welcome to Draw Tip Tuesday!

I use watercolors a lot - I like combining them with my ink line drawings (for which I use a fountain pen friendly waterproof ink: Platinum Black Carbon Ink). Watercolors combine well with colored pencils or crayons too. And it's very easy to take with you on location. It's the medium with which I color my world in my sketchbook.

I won't be recommending any brands here - I can only show you what I got attached to throughout the years; the colors that are very familiar to me and that work for me. I know how they behave when I combine them, so I don't need to think much about the mixes I make. When I would add paints from a different brand, I would need to get acquainted with those once again, and reinvent my palette.

Whatever brand of paints you use, make sure you know your colors.
If you don't know your palette well, make swatches. Take a look at the order they're in, on your palette. Does it make sense to you? Do you know the difference between your blue and your green? Sometimes that's very hard to see. Do you want them next to each other or would you rather have them further apart, so it works more intuitively?
Mix your paints and see how they behave. Try mixing more water, or less. And try it on different kinds of paper too, you might be surprised about the diversity of results.

I often get the question how to mix skin tone - and that of course is a question that doesn't have one answer, because there are as many skin tones as there are people in the world. I'll show you in today's video a few of an endless range of mixes.


The watercolors in my palette, all from the brand Daniel Smith:

Hansa Yellow Medium
New Gamboge (= warm yellow)
Monte Amiata Natural Sienna
Quinacridone Gold
Sap Green
Hooker’s Green
Cerulean Blue, Chromium
Ultramarine Blue
Indigo
Van Dyck Brown
Italian Burnt Sienna
Burnt Umber
Permanent Red Deep
Quinacridone Rose
Transparent Pyrrol Orange


If you'd like to learn from me in person: check out my workshop schedule here: https://www.koosjekoene.com/workshops

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