Watercolor Wednesday 02: Choosing Your Watercolor Palette

As part of our PLOT JOY campaign, our Founding Principal TJ Marston shared her 
Urban Sketching tips and tricks every Wednesday over the month of April. In her latest post, TJ gave her insight on how to choose your watercolor palette from various brands.

​Throughout your watercolor journey, you’re likely going to want to create your own palette, with your own preferences. With that in mind, I want to share some standards that you should consider when creating your own watercolor palette.


Tip 01:
Use a color wheel. A color wheel serves a guide when choosing colors for your palette. The best thing to do is to have more primaries in your palette, that way you can create more secondary colors. More variety of primary colors, means more variety of secondary colors. Cooler colors on the color wheel go towards the blues, while the warmer colors go towards the reds. 

Tip 02:
Pick warm and cool versions of each primary color. This way you have more control over how vibrant your colors are. For example, to create a vibrant orange you could mix a warmer yellow and a warm red. 

Tip 03:
Use a pigment color wheel to identify color hue (cool vs. warm.) You can download a pigment color wheel from handprint.com. This is a great tool to see if a color  you buy from the store is a cool hue or a warm hue.

Tip 04:
Fill your palette with primary colors.

Tip 05:
Add convenient colors.

Tip 06:
Study and get to know different pigments and brands.

Tip 07:
Get to know your colors through swatching.

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