Creating My Personal Color Palette And Using It To Paint A Sketchbook Spread

Hello and welcome back. My name is Sarah. I'm an artist and what I want to do today is create or attempt to create my own personal palette. That's what I've been trying to do here and I feel like I'm really close so I'm really excited to kind of finalize my palette. Where it started was this turnip. I love all of these colors. This has a red oxide unifying color or mother color. I love the I love all the dynamic greens and how it has some blues in here too. And then from there I kind of just wanted to use the red oxide unifier in a bit of a different way so I did more of a landscape here. This is my backyard. Kind of get more of those light blues in there to see how I want those to work and I really liked this as well. So from there I created this which is was my first attempt kind of at my personal palette. I really don't think I got it there. There's a lot of things missing. I did do this abstract color study that was basically just like the turnip deconstructed. You can see but yeah that was just trying to see if I had all the colors which I don't think I do yet but I feel like I'm really close. So today I'm kind of going to be compiling everything I like from all of this and really finalizing those colors that I want to use throughout all my pieces. The kind of point to this is I want my art to kind of be unified in some way and color is really important to me. I really like color so that felt like the easiest and the way that made the most sense for me. I'm also thinking about kind of transitioning into canvases maybe doing a series maybe submitting that series to a gallery. I don't know but I feel like step one is getting this palette together and kind of deciding which colors I want to use in my pieces. So yeah should be fun. Let's get into it. I was playing a little bit with trying to come up with a color palette but I feel like we still have a like a light pink and a lot of blue missing. I feel like I liked the blue better when it was or I liked the green better when it was more blue. I definitely like the prism violet better. I'll probably leave out the dioxide purple because I'm also introducing a Payne's gray and I feel like that will get this to this if I should ever need it. You can see here that a lot of the darker greens really leans into blue so I feel like I need to need to introduce that a little bit more instead of yeah with this instead of using the straight up hooker's green maybe I could use a light blue and hooker's green which actually would make a lot of sense too because in here this painting that I did if I wanted to do the landscapes I would need the light blue. I don't think that I actually used a light blue here. I used um I think it was ultramarine blue and then I mixed it with white so maybe just some straight up ultramarine blue and then we can mix white as needed. We also have the option instead of using the hooker's green and ultramarine blue and having to mix it we could use like a I'm not going to say this right but poly cyanide green or like a phthalo green that already has blue in it. Maybe not though because I think I would want the option of having it more warm. I'm torn with the red oxide and the burnt sienna though. Maybe hold on let's actually let's let's test that first before we move any further. Okay so those are mother options. This is the light pink and light blue. We could just have white and ultramarine blue. I'm torn though because we can keep the light blue because I'm definitely going to be adding in the the Payne's gray. We have our primary yellow lots of white obviously and then for green I guess we'll stick with the hooker's green because I do like this. I like this color here and it deepens it with the mother. It's just it's pastel but maybe I like that because it really would be the difference between like this is this is the hooker's green by itself this is it with the light blue and it really it softens it and I think that's why I liked this so much. So yeah so we're gonna keep the the light blue I've decided. So those two I think I'm definitely gonna need some more hooker's green this is like empty. Oh and the purple duh. It's very odd too because I want this to be a very warm palette but I also want to do like landscapes and stuff with it so yeah and this right here was heavily inspired by this which is kind of backwards because usually I do the abstract color study and then the illustration but the abstract color study came from the illustration this time. What was I saying? Oh yeah so it's very I think it's going to be a little bit tricky because I want it to be a very warm palette but I also want to have a lot of blues and greens because I want I want to do landscapes and natural stuff and but I feel like at least in these two illustrations here it kind of demonstrated to me that it can work in the way that I want it to. Maybe less so in here but again this is using a different green this is using the green that I mixed up with the hooker's green and the light blue so these are kind of like very dynamic greens. I think I like that better. The blues kind of almost lean a little bit purple which I like it kind of softens it and it kind of ties in the purple here. Yeah so I'm going to try to capture everything that I like from here from this and what I feel like I'm missing in this color study because I tried this is my first attempt but it's definitely missing stuff so I'm going to try again. This is unrelated just don't pay attention to that but I want to see I kind of want to just play with this burnt sienna and this red oxide to see if there's enough of a difference. I think there is. I feel like I can already tell I like the red oxide better and I mean I guess shocker that's why I was using it. This is the burnt sienna this is the red oxide uh I don't know it seems to be more opaque which functionally would be nice goodness I just kind of halfway feel silly for doing this too because like they're almost the same like it's like comparing oranges to oranges. I can definitely see it the burnt sienna is definitely cooler but I also want to do just like the quickest mixing study ever with a little white and Payne's gray see the undertones if we can and how they how they shadow. I feel like that's one of the biggest things. There's a very nice pink but actually we'll probably eliminate the light pink from like the colors that I would be I guess preemptively buying. Oh no I don't want it mixing in here save that for like the whitest white um I feel like you can definitely tell the difference especially when there's the white involved. This is more of like an orange it has more orange undertones this has more like red undertones and that is like so very obvious when you put the white in there uh and just for the for the lulls I guess we'll still do the shadow. I feel like this gets very dark very quick because it's already kind of like a darker color. It's very interesting though because I would have thought that this one would have came out more red maybe that's just my lack of color knowledge um I like it I like it so I think the red oxide is kind of like a resounding winner for me anyway like I definitely like the redder undertones. I like the way that it mixes with the blue. I do like the burnt sienna and I think locally you would say that that looks more like like a tree color like the browns that you would want but I feel like for the warmer kind of calmer tone that I'm going for like warmer in the sense of like a warmer feeling and like a warmer color I guess that's the same thing I don't know. This definitely is more of what I had in mind with the red oxide not the sienna um but I think that that satisfied my curiosity. We're gonna put the burnt sienna away and I'm gonna keep using my red oxide. All right so now we're going to go ahead and build the palette. I'm going to start with the mother color here. The first thing I want to do is mix it with white and just see the pinks that we can get out of just the mother color and then after this I feel like the second most important color is green so I'm going to mix up the hooker's green and the light blue. That's going to be the base for all of our greens. Get a little bit of that mother color in there and that's going to just like our base green and then again just mixing it with white to see how light we can get it with just the white and then I also wanted to mix it with yellow so that we could get some more dynamic highlights and I mixed each level of that white with yellow but I also wanted to do shadow colors with the ultramarine blue but when I did that there's no white in those levels it's just ultramarine blue and then sorry really fast um the second shadow study was with Payne's gray. I also had to get those purples in there so I mixed a little bit of the prism purple with the mother color and then I did the same thing with the white. I also wanted to do a study here of what it would look like with more of the mother like letting that kind of take over the color and then again the two shadow studies are with ultramarine blue and then Payne's gray. After I did the shadow studies though I kind of I mixed it with white to see I don't know what those shadows looked like lightened up um I don't know that I'll use those but it's there. The brown over in the corner there that is my green mixed with the mother color. Those are essentially opposite colors so I knew it would make like a brown but I knew I would need browns if I was going to do landscapes with this palette. The blues I didn't go into as much as I probably should have but I did mix up some blues for skies and stuff. At this point I'm kind of calling the palette done for now. I know this isn't all the colors that I needed like I didn't even get the yellow involved but I knew I had enough of a foundation to start using it to see how I wanted to get other colors involved and how I wanted to manipulate these colors more. At this point usually what I do is I create like an abstract color study which is what I'm doing over on the left here. This abstract color study doesn't really end up being a good representation of the palette. Just because I was mostly trying to use up the paint a lot of the colors got muddy and I actually did get a little bit of yellow involved here just to see what I could do with the greens but unfortunately my palette was a mess at this point so it just ends up kind of being like a muddy mess and you know I'm not one to shy away from muddy colors. I feel like all the art advice we hear it tells us not to make muddy colors not to mix black because it'll make the colors muddy and I think it really depends on the subject and the color palette because with this color palette with using it I found a lot of really dynamic greens and browns that by themselves I guess you could say they're muddy colors but they work really well within this palette and we'll get into that a little bit more I guess as they come up. So the first thing that I'm going to paint with this color palette is going to be this beautiful tree here. I started by laying down a watered-down version of just the mother color and then I went in with my sky color. In the reference photo you can see it's almost kind of like white. I knew I definitely wanted to have some of the blue in there even if it was just a little bit and it was very interesting because when I mix the blue with the mother color and a lot of white so it was really bright it kind of turned this beautiful blue gray color that I really liked. Getting started with the trunk here I knew with the colors within this palette that the tree itself could go like one of three ways. I could do like the gray color kind of like the sky. I could go more of like a warm tone which it does have some warm tones in like the highlights or I could go more of a green and make it all kind of like a green wash. As I'm kind of carving out the shape here I went for green. I think I was trying to get more of that mother color in there so it would be more of like a like a musty rusty musty rusty like a rusty um sorry I crack myself up apparently. What I was trying to say is like a rusty gray. I knew I didn't really like this green when I put it down but at this point I'm just using it to try to carve out the shape and find like the shadows and highlights. I'm also using that sky color to kind of like take back some of the shape and it was a very abnormal very organic shape and I was having trouble really trying to find how I wanted it to be on the paper because the good thing about like organics and stuff like this is it doesn't have to be exactly as the reference. It's actually preferable that it's not an exact copy but you still you need to understand how the objects within your image interact with each other and then you can replicate it and manipulate it but I was still trying to get the understanding of how these curves went into each other and where the shadows went and how all of these branches and leaves interacted with each other. And as I was studying and learning like where the highlights go where the shadows go that's when I kind of let more of the color come in. As you can see here I'm starting to introduce more of like that brown like a traditional tree color. When this all comes together like I introduced like all the colors because the tree in the reference photo itself is like a gray and I did want some grays in here but I wanted to get those warm rusty colors in there too because it is in the reference photo like it does have some of those like warm colors but I wanted that in there. I wanted a lot of deep shadows and within the shadows I wanted them to have like some blues or maybe Payne's gray. Here I'm trying to like introduce some yellow. I didn't really like that. I kind of just went over that with a warm highlight but I guess what I'm trying to say is I wasn't really concerned with the painting being completely photo accurate. The idea for this painting was more of just playing with the colors and seeing how I can get them to work within different types of paintings like landscapes and things with organic stuff. It's kind of funny too because this palette was kind of built off of a illustration of flowers and fruit and I because of that didn't really mix up a lot of blues and things that you would need for a landscape like I'm kind of also having to come up with these blues and grays as I'm painting which I mean is what I normally do but I did the whole like palette and color study beforehand so that I wouldn't have to do that. I actually went with a tree first because I severely overthought this. I don't know if you remember but in the beginning of this video I said that the kind of purpose of me doing this is so that I could start doing some paintings on canvas and I guess that's always kind of been my eventual goal but like the purpose of this was to kind of like push towards that a little bit more but declaring that and making this like grand plan that I was going to start like planning a series and making it cohesive it cost me to overthink all of it which honestly isn't a surprise like I when it comes to me in art I really just need to do what I guess I feel like doing at the time like I just I need to go with the flow I need to do it because it's fun the moment that I assign importance to it it like it just all goes out the window for me. I had a lot of fun building the palette but when I went to go paint with it I was like oh my goodness what do I paint and I'm like well I got to paint the subjects that I'm going to be putting on my canvases and I was like well what am I going to be putting on my canvases from there I literally thought about it for like a day or two straight and I intellectualized it and I decided the thing that made the most sense for me as a person my colors and what I've painted in the past what's done well in the past like social media wise was landscapes and trees trees specifically in landscapes and I feel like me making this grand declaration that I am now a tree painter it ruined it like it wasn't fun anymore and I feel like I didn't have any freedom and I feel like that comes through a little bit with both of these illustrations in this sketchbook spread in the end I do like how both of them turned out with the tree though after I was done filming I kind of went in and did a couple more like highlights I actually introduced a little bit more of that purple because I didn't have any of the purple in here after I was done filming and then on the right here I decided to go with a bouquet of flowers I have done quite a few bouquet of flowers I was kind of exclusively doing bouquets of flowers for my ACEOs now I don't really sell ACEOs or I guess auction ACEOs anymore but I was going real hard on them for a while I think I actually kind of went too hard because burnt myself out now I just have no interest it actually might be more of the same thing where like I assigned importance to it it now had become something that I had to do so I didn't want to do it but with this bouquet of flowers I didn't even get to the point where I actually added flowers I still like the way that it turned out because it's very pretty leaves it has these flower buds on it that have these really cool shaped stems and I like that but this entire time I was overthinking it so much and I feel like the colors don't end up being as vibrant as they could be everything ends up on the bouquet at least the tree wasn't so bad especially since I kind of like cleaned that up while I wasn't being filmed but the flower bouquet just ends up being so tight and I had spent an entire sketchbook if you saw last week I did a sketchbook tour I spent that entire sketchbook trying to get myself out of the habit of being a perfectionist and worrying about if things look good like I just I had built a mindset of like just create art and have fun and what I had done by like declaring that I was gonna have this color palette and I was gonna paint on canvas and like I even had like plans in my head of like when I was gonna submit them to galleries like I was thinking way too far ahead I was doing way too much and it was just ruining my process and in turn I feel like ruining my art so at this point what was the point and again it's not that I'm calling my art ugly I feel like technical skill wise and understanding of color theory and how things work together like I can make a pretty painting kind of regardless but for me personally I just don't feel that I enjoy like the hustle of it and before I like got in my head spiral of like I have to do this this and this and then sell my work I went back to what I was trying to do which was plainly I was just trying to unify my pieces through a cohesive color family because I really like color and I want all my colors to kind of like mesh together not with every single piece like I still want to work with other color palettes but I wanted to build like my personal palette that was the whole point of this one thing that I noticed that's very interesting about how I use these colors is especially within the bouquet I use the red oxide as a mother color but I don't actually use the plain red oxide so it's not a part of the palette in this page when I built the palette the red oxide was actually the background and the majority of the image that I was basing it off of so it was very interesting to see these colors being used in a little bit of a different way I also really leaned into the purples like the deep purples with this one I did use the prism violet I have the dioxide purple that is darker but with this I specifically wanted to use the prism violet because that's the one that I want to buy and use when I use up all of my sample sizes and I mixed the Payne's gray with that to deep it in the reference photo it was actually black leaves but I didn't want to like introduce a black and then in the leaves and the stems there's actually a lot of yellow in there so that's why they're so bright I'm not sure that I'll go that bright again but after I added more muted highlights and shadows it didn't end up being that bad but I think with the purple the bright yellowy green isn't my favorite so I guess it's kind of like a happy accident that I didn't really use the colors as I was originally intending but it really did kind of like open up my mind to the idea that I could create this personal palette and I could definitely use it in the way that it was used in the reference photo or my original photo that I built it from but I could also manipulate it to where it's still kind of the same palette it's still the same color family but I can use it in these different ways and I'm going to explain that a little bit better using examples I did continue to use this color palette off camera and I made a couple more paintings with it and I want to show you so here is the illustration done I do absolutely love the way that it came out they're both kind of moody they're not very bright the highlights I don't know I feel like it just could be pushed more but I do like them I like how that came out what I was talking about though with using the color palette in different ways I continued after I finished this I stopped recording I continued to paint the very first one afterwards was this and I I absolutely love this I feel like this is exactly what I was trying to do it has it shows more of the red oxide and that's what I mean like the red oxide isn't just the mother color it's also a part of the palette like it's used as one of the colors I didn't at first but I feel like eventually I had to push more yellow the highlights much like this one was they weren't popping they weren't highlighting so I had to really push those yellows and the whites and it really worked for the dappled light in here and then also the slug when I originally did the slug it was more of like the red oxide it kind of blended in with the log it didn't really stand out but this is kind of like an example of what I was saying like how I used the color because they're all the same colors right and it's all it all has the mother of the red oxide but pushing the colors in certain directions it just it looks like almost a completely different palette but if you were to put these two next to each other they would still go next to each other because they have the same mother and then the next one I did was this one I really leaned into the reds and pinks with this one and I actually especially for these flowers here I introduced a primary red to really bring the pinks out and then the next one I can't show you because I actually did record that and it's not to be a tease but it's absolutely gorgeous but the next one that I did I actually ended up really I think perfecting what I've been trying to do with that color palette this video actually ended up being a little bit longer than I was intending so I've made it to the end thank you so much for watching I absolutely love making these videos and just doing art and talking about art it's my favorite thing if you enjoyed this video don't forget to like subscribe and hype I post a video every Thursday at noon eastern time and like I said earlier my next video is going to be that it's actually a landscape and we're going to be working with my personal palette but yeah again thank you so much for watching that's going to be it for me this week I will see you next week bye