But if you wanted to match a color that was on a piece of fabric, or in a painting that you're working on, or a photograph that you don't want to ruin, you don't want to swatch here I'm swatching a paint chip. So I don't care about the paint chip. But what if I wanted to swatch something that I care about, in which case, let's look at, let's just say you have a print and you really like the print don't want to ruin the print with little paint swatches all around. One good piece of advice is to use index cards. So grab an index card using the side that is blank. And you can swatch the card and match it to whatever color you're matching.

Let's say a matching, I would pick a color in here and say well, I want that orange, I want that green, and then you would keep matching. keep changing your color and keeps watching it and putting it next to it without ruining your print. If you were working with watercolor or fluid Paint or inks, then instead of swatching on a paint chip or an index card, you would want to swatch in the way that you're going to be painting it. For instance, if I was going to make this into a washy acrylic wash or watercolor, if it was watercolor, I would want to add water to it each time I mixed and add it on to a watercolor paper or whatever surface I'll be working on to see what the color looks like. Then I could blow dry it if I want, or magic wet and hold it up next to what I'm where I'm working.

Now this palette that we've been working with this full palette, again, a full palette is a warm and cool of each of the three primary colors red, yellow and blue, plus titanium white, and then I like to throw in black even though it's optional. This full palette has worked really well to match colors. But when I'm painting I need to improve this palette a little bit more To give me some more options, and I call that an enhanced full palette, so when I'm ready to paint, what I'll do is I'll add these following items. First of all, all of my paints here. Each one has its own opacity and transparency. I know we talked about a little bit, the modern in the mineral colors, the mineral had more of an opaque coverage, and the moderns they're opaque when they're used thickly, but when you try to use them normally in a medium or thin amount, you can start to see streaks because they are somewhat more transparent.

But every color here, I can make it more opaque or more transparent by adding white to make it more opaque and mediums or gels to make it more transparent. So I have white on my palette, so I'm able to take white and add it to the different colors to make remember when we made the little tails I can make a tint the minerals will tint that means as soon as I add white, and these two are mineral colors, I cleaned up my palette so somehow I lost my little tails there. You can see that the color gets lighter, but also chalk here on all the mineral colors. Let's try to one on here in this red. This is a mineral red, it gets lighter, but chalky or it loses its intensity, it loses its punch, its brightness. Now with the modern colors.

When we add a little bit of white, we can actually, not only do we bring out their brightness, see if I can do it here. Here we go. Look at how bright that is compared to how it is in its mass tone or thick quality. But also we're making it more transparent. We're almost turning it into what a mineral color will act like by adding the white. So we can make things more opaque by adding white.

But again, we're also making the minerals chalky and the modern public or bright with that white. If we want to make something more transparent, we need more medium, we need more clear binder to add to the paint to make it more transparent. So in this line of paint called Open, there's an open medium, and I usually put it right in the middle of the palate. This medium looks white when it's wet, as most acrylic does, and it will dry clear. It also comes in a gel if I like texture, I might want to have the gel version instead of the medium version, either one will enable you to while you're mixing a color. If I take this color and while I'm mixing it, if I add medium or gel to it, I'm making it much more transparent.

And then when I apply it over something that means whatever's underneath will be able to be seen. So by adding medium, or gel, I can now make any of my colors more transparent. I added in the middle of my palette because it gets very confusing, you will think it's white paint if it's over here near the white. That's why I always set up my palette the same way the white paint is always here on the left and then I make an arc like that. And my mediums and gels are always in the center. That way, I don't have to keep remembering, oh, this white stuff over here is going to turn clear.

So that's one thing that I do to improve a full palette bringing into what I call the enhanced full palette. The next thing I like to do is I like to add secondary colors on my palette, even though I can mix them it's nice to have them to go too quickly. So our secondary colors are orange, green and purple. And so this, this is optional, obviously because I could make my own orange but it's nice to have it and I like to put them in between their primary components. So I'll put the orange purposely between the yellow and the red to remind That's a secondary and here is a green. I can't really put it between the blue and the yellow, so I'll just put it over here.

Can't always be perfect, I guess. And then purple I like having a purple and I use what's called dioxins in purple. It's a modern color. And the other two that I put down the orange and the green are mineral. Let me talk a little bit more about mineral modern. I really covered it very briefly before but it is very important to understand the difference between the two types of paint.

Let me summarize it this way. When you have a palette, what you're doing is you're arranging enough colors and enough options to give yourself the most variety, the most potential in your painting to go warmer or cooler with a color and to go with a modern or mineral color. And then of course you have transparency and opacity lots of choices. That's what the enhanced full palette is about giving lots of choices. So let me just talk about that modern and mineral again. Any color that looks like it's very bright right away, the yellows, the orange, the red you can see these four colors in a row.

They are the brightest they are right out of their tube or jar however they come. These are mineral colors, mineral colors, remind me of crayons, you grab a crayon and it is what it is. That looks green. It's green, it looks red, it's red. The modern colors are the trickier ones. Look at these.

Look at these two right here. This dioxin purple and yellow blue. Both of those names sound modern. And they both look black. They both look like black. If I make a little tail as we did before, you can see this color is gorgeous purple.

You wouldn't know it from its mass tone or its amount that thick there. Same with this fellow blew my decision of adding a modern or mineral while I'm mixing colors. I didn't mention this before, but when I looked at my paint chip and my swatch and I said, I need to add a little bit more red. I could use either red, but one is going to be cooler one's going to be warmer. So I would make that decision based on what the swatch was. But I'm also looking at mineral versus modern, I would choose the modern color if I needed a real Kapow red.

A modern colors are very, very strong mixtures, you only need a tiny little bit to add to your color to change it. Whereas the mineral you can add a lot more and they're kind of slower in the mixing they're slower changing the mixture. So it is good to have modern and mineral on here. In fact, since I have only I have a cool and a warm yellow here, but these are both mineral yellows. I'm going to add the modern versions of a cool in a warm Here, I think it'll be a little bit more obvious. I'll just put him here because I want to compare.

Modern colors are very deceptive. When you see them in their mass tone, they just don't look like what they really can do. So if you look at these two colors, it looks like an ochre in green, but actually, let's look at the thin version. Look at that beautiful yellow, who would know from that mass tone and so if I put a little bit of white in a tail here, you can see that it's a gorgeous, warm yellow, very close to that. And the same with this green gold, this is nickel, so yellow and this is green gold. If I add a little bit of white, you can start to see it turned into very nice beautiful cool yellow.

So it's nice to have you need to have Warm in a pool of each primary. But it's also nice to have a mineral in a modern version too, so that you can use something, a small amount of something and really punch up that color, or use more of it and have a slower change in the color. So I hope that makes more sense between modern and mineral. In my book create perfect paintings. I do spend more time talking about the mineral and modern colors, and it is important on your palette. So now I've added medium and gel to allow myself to be able to change the transparency of the color.

I've added some secondary colors orange, green, and purple, merely for convenience, so I can just grab them without mixing them every time I need them. And there's another change that I'd like to make to this palette to make it a lot easier for me to paint and come up with better results in my painting. And that is to make extra light mixtures and extra dark mixtures. Let me explain why we need that. Here's a great scale, or you could say it's a tonal scale, it's in 10 steps, we could say that one is white, and 10 is black. Number one is white, and number 10 is black.

And it goes all the way from white to black with all the grays in between. Now it's I think it's important to be able to translate color into tone, because when you make a painting, sometimes if it's all the same tone, if it's all a gray, in turn, but you still have red, blue, and green, they can all be transformed into a tone. So if we took all of the tubes of color that we have, let's start with yellow. I'll just take a yellow red and a blue color right out of the tube is pretty strong right away. Yellow. Some people think that that's a number one, but it's not if we look, yellow is really somewhere between a three and a four there.

Usually great, it's usually a four, this grayscale, so a little darker. And as soon as we get to all the other colors, trying to match them up with what I think that their tone would be, if you took a color your color palette and took a photograph of it and put it in your computer and ran it in Photoshop or whatever software you have, often they give you the option to change it into a grayscale or tonal scale. If you do that you might be surprised to see if you have a full range of values. full range of values isn't always important in every painting, but it's good to be able to evaluate your painting based on grayscale and tone. All I wanted to say is that this palette is really worked into the dark area of this tonal scale. We have white over here and almost all the other colors are going to fall in this darker range.

So What happens often with paintings is that all the light values aren't either white out of the tube or a yellow. And I think that the more nuanced subtle light values you have in on your palette, you will also get in your painting. And you'll have to do that by pre mixing, or you don't have to, but it's a better way to do it. In other words, I want to say that the way you set up your palette is going to foreshadow how your painting is going to look. If you don't have a certain color in your palette, it's not going to end up in your painting. So if you don't have light values, and actually a variation of dark values to on your palette, you're going to end up with kind of a, your painting is going to have a tonal value that's kind of warped into a darker range.

So here's what I do for my enhanced full palette. This big jump between white and yellow. I don't want to have that happen in my painting. So I'll squeeze out three more whites and each one is going to get a small amount of red, yellow or blue. so small that it's not going to look like much difference. But in a painting, it'll really make a difference.

The more variety you have in a painting, the more interest you'll get visual interest you will get, it will look more spatial. I don't know if you can see the difference between this but I don't want to turn it into a light yellow. If I put too much yellow in, it'll be a light yellow, I want it to be a yellowish white. Then I'm going to take a tiny bit of red. If it gets to be pink, it's too much red. I got these a little close together but and then I'll put a little bit of blue and in this case I'm picking mineral colors because I want a subtle change if I use that Much in a modern color, it would turn to light blue.

Now I have, these are all number ones. The White is a number one and I have a slightly yellow, a slightly red and a slightly blue, white. So now I'm going to divide them up should have given myself a little more room here. A lot more room still work and I'm going to add a little bit more of each of the same color. So now I have a number two or number three value of each had a little more red and this one and little more blue in this one. I recently had a student just last week and she said you don't really do this whole package.

For every type of painting you do, and I said, Well, not every type if I'm doing a wash, ground wash or something I won't, but if I have to fix a small area on my painting, I have to have all the colors because once you fixed one small area, you end up fixing other areas. And if you don't have a full and enhanced palette, you're going to end up taking away a lot of nuance in your painting. So I don't know if you can see this, but I now have white I have seven choices. For light values. I have a white and I have a number 121 and two in yellow, red and blue. Now I'm going to give myself some variations and darks.

I have black straight out of the tube. If I use every time I want to use a black I use the same black it's going to look like wallpaper my painting is just going to look boring. The more variety you have, the better. So I'm going to make a mixed black and for that I'm going to use the modern colors. Remember the modern colors in their mass tone are always there. So I'm going to use the yellow blue and the quinacridone magenta.

So it's a blue, a red and a yellow. And for yellow, I can use modern yellow or mineral yellow doesn't matter. Well, it does matter. It makes different blacks. But let's start with all moderns. Here's all moderns, the blue, the red and the yellow are all modern.

Let's mix them together and see what we get. Then I'll try adding some mineral colors and we'll look at the difference. Now modern colors always look black, in their mass tone. Not all of them like green gold doesn't but most of them do. Let's add a little bit of white and see what we've got. It's very green.

If I want to neutralize that and make it more Black Black, I can add more of the red in it more blue. In other words, you can actually shift your black around instead of just dealing with the same kind of boring gray black out of the tube. You can make a black this little bluer little redder little yellow over. Now it's starting to get more neutral. So it's fun to add to add mixtures of black. If we did the modern version, I'm sorry, the mineral version of a black.

So we take a red and a blue Ultramarine Blue Pyro red and I'll use the hands a yellow. I'll just take it from here. I've got plenty there. So here it's a mineral version of red, blue and yellow, mixed it together. The more yellow you put in, the more brown the black will get This will still give you a really beautiful black just tends to go a little more brown than using the modern colors. This is more of a brown.

So if I add more of the blue, see, get a cooler stretch to look more like less like a brown and more like a black. So now I have my enhanced palette. I've got my warm and cool primaries that I set up with the full palette, I've got my extra secondary colors just for convenience sake. I have my medium and gel to make it more transparent. And I have lots of choices of lights and darks which I think really adds some punch to your painting. The palette that we just went over the full palette and the enhanced full palette are perfect for when you're using a slow drying paint, like oil paint, or the open acrylics, the slow drying acrylics that I was using but it's If you're using something else, like the regular acrylics that aren't open are usually pretty fast drying and where I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico, they dry really fast.

This type of palette arrangement would not work by the time I finished putting out all my colors, the first ones would be dry, I wouldn't get to use it. So I do a different system for using the fast drying acrylic. Let's let's look at that. What I found really works and that keeps me from wasting paint is that I get these small jars with lids and I will mix up the color in the jar. Let's say it's a cool yellow or warm yellow right out of the tube. I'll actually put the pure color in here and I find the two paints a little thick for me.

So I'll add a little bit of water, maybe a little retarder or a little glazing liquid to slow down the drying just a little bit because I live in Santa Fe new Mexico if you don't have to, but the key is that they're in these jars with lids. And what I do is I swatch the lid on the top, here's the mass tone and the undertone or thick and thin, and then here is a tint adding a little bit of white. So right here I see what my color looks like in the jar. If I open the jar, the color looks very very different plus it's in the shadow I can barely see it. So this really helps. I'll do this with all my colors here I just put out a yellow red and a blue.

But I will do the whole full palette, two yellows, two reds, two blue, black and white in the jars when I'm ready to paint. And then also I'll add the orange green purple mediums, gels and the light values and dark values too. If I'm ready to do an enhanced full palette for just mixing colors, I can go back to that regular full palette of the eight, six basic colors plus white and then I like black. And then when I do is I will just instead of of scooping them out of the jars, I will just do this. I put them out on a plastic on the HDPE Plexi or the other pallets that I mentioned. And I'll put the lid right in front of it almost like the tails that I did so you can see what the color is.

And then I can just go into the jar whenever I want. And if I want to take a break, I just close them and it really keeps them wet a lot longer, and it saves paint. So that's a great idea for your fast drying acrylic. Then I just have them all I have a pretty big table. At this point I have about this size filled with jars, all swatched with the color so it's kind of fun, saves time I don't have to mix many colors anymore, unless I want to by just grabbing the colors that look close to what I need and spreading them out that way. So that's one solution to the fast drying acrylic.

What if you're using acrylic in washes. Or watercolor or inks, anything that's very, very fluid. You wouldn't want to use the jars and you wouldn't want to use the palette. If you use the big palette like I just did. As soon as you add water to everything, it's kind of puddle all into one big puddle. And in here, you can't really make dilutions like you'd want.

You can't make it add more water and less water if you're taking it right out of the jar. So what I like to do is, I like to take my paints and here's the fluid paints. You can see them I'll put them like this. And for my full palette, I want two reds, to yellows to blues, just like before, but I will put them on plates, I can usually get two colors per plate without them turning into mud. Now, when I'm using washes with acrylic paint, I only use modern colors. So here's how Another distinguishing factor between the modern and the mineral.

I'm going to use this green gold and the nickel as a yellow as my two yellows a warm and a cool yellow. And why am I using modern instead of the mineral colors? Well if I used the mineral colors, as soon as I add water and it's over white, it's going to get chalky. But the modern colors when I add water stay super bright. So if I want to have maximum color, I have to use the modern colors when I'm using washes, which means I'm done looting them with a lot of water. So let's just look at this blue here.

Here's the two blues. On blue. This is anthro quinoa and blue and fellow blue to modern blues. And here's my two modern read. I actually like To use quinacridone burnt orange as my warm red and quinacridone magenta as my cool red. And remember how we made little pop tails by adding white to the each one of the paints on the other palette.

This time instead of adding white, I'm just going to add little bits of water and that you can see the difference between the mass tone in the undertone. called different These colors are when you start to add water. I'm gonna try one more. here just to show you remember how beautiful these yellows looked when we added white to same thing when we're adding water and putting it over white. So for a full palette when I'm using washes or I want to imitate watercolor, I will work this way I will take plates and I'll do two per plate and I also instead of adding a lot of water to the paint itself, I like to make this little puddle here. And then I can regulate as I paint.

I can go into more of the paint and make it more intense, or I can go more into the water and make it less intense. So again, every pallet should give you maximum opportunity to maximum potential for getting the most variety you can out of how you're working. Another cool trick is if you're using washes a lot, I really do like this method, but you can always use ice cube trays to make sort of a general wash, you're still going to need a palette to mix some of them to be able to add more water and more color. But when you add them in the ice cube trays and you get these, these are obviously dry or they would be selling but when you get these giant Ziploc bags, you can store them leaving them upright and once you close off a Ziploc bag, they will last for months.

So it's another way of not wasting too much paint. These are some alternatives to the palette that I was demonstrating with any type of paint you're using any type of painting style you're using like washes or opaque paint or transparent paint, you're still going to need a full palette or an enhanced full palette, you're still going to need all of those options. So hopefully this will help. And this concludes our video. I thank you so much for joining me