Color Charts

Color theory goes deep, but color charts are a great way to start to understand colors and your specific pigments on your palette. Artist Katie Liddiard talks about why color charts are important and how to go about your own.

She starts out with a simplified palette of lead white, yellow ochre, vermillion, and van dyke brown, or maybe you would want to use black. This simple palette contains the primary colors, yellow, red, and black acting as the blue when mixed and can get you far in a painting. But she wanted to see how ultramarine blue would work with this palette as well since it’s a very common color to use.

Within the chart that she’s already created, pure ultramarine is placed in the proper square, followed by mixing it with white. Now she moves onto mixing ultramarine with the yellow to create a muted green. Then she shows what happens when mixing more yellow than blue and more blue than yellow.

Moving onto mixing the blue with vermillion to create a deep purple. And then mixing the blue with van dyke brown to create an almost black color.

Color charts are a great way to not only start to understand the specific properties of your paints, but are great references for use in future paintings. If you need to know how to mix a specific color for a piece, you can bring out your color charts and they will tell you exactly what colors you mixed together to get it before. They’re incredibly useful to have on hand, so give some color charts a try!