You Have Too Many Paints: How to Build Your Palette

Tyler Provick

Tyler Provick is a writer and a gamer that likes to combine his two interests and share them with the community.

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6 responses

  1. Zab says:

    To help you with color mixing, theory and palette exploation i suggest getting a book called color by betty edwards. I thought i had a good handle on that stuff. You will be surprised and have lots of fun. Also, i just started using golden myself, love them 🙂

    • Thanks. I’ll keep an eye out for that book. I am 100% ebooks for fiction and comics so there’s nothing to look forward to at bookstores, as much as I love them. Also, I do have a complaint with the Golden High Flow. Off the brush they are incredibly, brilliantly glossy. It is fine for painting army styles but it is impossible to judge blending. I need to order some Golden Super-Loaded Matte Medium to take the sheen off while painting.

  2. Lasgunpacker says:

    Tyler you are crazy!

    Well, not really. I think it is probably more important to limit your palette per project than it is to limit it over all projects. So if you are painting some sort of space marine, pick the few colors that go into that space marine color scheme, and then highlight and shade with mixes. Harder to do with, say, an Imperial Guardsman (of Napoleon), but the same thing can be done there too.

    As for me, as a color deficient person it is very handy to pick up a paint called “US field drab” and paint parts of uniforms that are supposed to be that color with that paint. Mixing it myself based on references would be far too chancy, and depending on the light, it would probably vary too much anyway.

    • It is definitely nice to have a pot of paint that is exactly the colour you want. Especially pale drab colours are difficult mixing because the paint is so saturated and high in chroma.

  3. Thor says:

    I can’t blame you for going with a limited palette. If I were to look at the colors I use the most then could easily narrow it down to 8-10 colors and yet I own over 60+ paints. I don’t mind the expense. It’s not like I bought them all at once and dumped hundreds of dollars in a purchase. I also have good luck with their longevity, especially Vallejo. I’m using a Sombre Grey for my CSM that I’ve had for over three years now. Still, I can see the appeal of working with a limited palette and I look forward to seeing how this works out for you.

  4. I just got back into painting after a 20 year hiatus. I think I bought about a dozen paints to get back into, and I know there are two or three I could have lived without. I for one like the variation that comes with not having the exact colours all the time. Even where I need to touch something up, that little bit of difference adds to the look, I think. I approve of your idea!

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