How to Build Your Color Palette with Matthew White
Matthew White’s, Ep.102, palette is in some way a record of his favorite artists and workshops.
You’ll find that many of his 12-15 colors are also on the palettes of painters like Joseph Zbukvic and Andy Evansen (Ep.12).
Every color on a palette gets there some way and here’s how White has built his palette over time.
First, he's taken workshops and paid attention to the type of colors his favorite painters use.
For example, he saw Joseph Zbukvic use cobalt turquoise and White loved the greens it could create. So he added it to his palette.
He'd pull in colors from his teachers.
But that's only the first step.
The second step was to paint... a lot. Through that painting he can now use the colors he’s brought in and decide if they actually work for him.
Does he like the colors they mix? Does he like the saturation levels and how they work with his paper? Does he like the secondaries and tertiaries and neutrals they make?
Through painting and asking questions and then painting some more, he learns if they work for his goals and preferences.
If it works, the color stays and gets folded into his style. If it doesn’t work, he removes it.
White's palette has been slowly developing over almost a decade of painting and while often the tubes of paint are inspired by his favorite artists, his palette as a whole is now his.
Put it to Practice:
Taking classes and having mentors is a great way to learn new colors in action.
Classes have material lists including the preferred paints and you can see how a teacher uses those paints. It’s a great way to preview materials in use. Which in turn can be a great first step to see if you might like to use them.
Seeing what others use is a great place to start. And it’s just that, a starting point. Just because those colors work for another artist, even an artist you greatly admire, doesn’t mean that they are all the right colors for you. So now it’s time to really use those colors to see if they are actually a good fit for YOU.
You can only learn that through trial and error and asking questions. Your color preferences depend on your goals and the type of art you’re trying to make and what you need the colors to do in that art. And you can only learn either of those through lots of brush miles.