Discovering new colours

Do you find that you are always attracted to the same colours?

It may be colours you choose to wear, or to decorate your home. If you are a painter you will almost certainly have a colour palette that feels personal and natural to you.

Some people go for cheery brights every time, while others prefer a more subtle softness that you get with more tertiary colours. At college my colours were always referred to as ‘squashed fruit’ colours!

One of the reasons for my #aprilcolour project was to stretch the colours that I mix and to learn about new paint pigments that are available. Let’s see if they can earn a place in my palette…

Quinacridone Burnt Orange (what a fabulous name, if you can remember it!) is, as the name suggests, a warmer brown tinged orange. It is often recommended for using as a warm wash to be used as ground or as a glaze as it has a high transparency. Introduced as part of the quinacridone pigment range in the 1950’s I admit it was a totally new colour to me and I was keen to see how it behaved.

I choose to mix with Paynes Gray and found this gave a beautiful range of soft plum colours. The Paynes Gray and Yellow Ochre gave a range of olive greens that softened to sage green with the addition of white. Here is my mixing page:

Using a drawing from my sketchbook, I created this postcard landscape for the day’s daily painting. The colours worked well for me; enough softness so that they sat well together, a good range of deep purple and grey darks with the zing of the orange to provide a lift of colour without clashing as a brighter orange could do.

Quinacridone Burnt Orange is definitely a colour I will be using more frequently – this one’s a winner!