So let's get started. The first thing we need to do is make our palette. Now I want to define palette because palette has two different meanings and can be very confusing. The word palette could be the actual surface or material that you're going to use to put your paints on. And next. The word palette can also be an arrangement of how you place your colors in the best way for you to mix and match colors.

So it's either the material that you're actually using, and it could also be the arrangement that you're doing and I use it both ways. So hopefully, it won't be too confusing. I'll try to make sure I clarify each time I use the word. So first, let's start talking about the actual material, the palette as a surface that you're going to use to mix and match paint. You want to make sure it's smooth, so that as you're mixing paint, you don't get Glocks have something else coming up. You want it to be smooth, it should be easily cleanable And it should be non porous, which means it should be shiny or glossy so that the paint won't sink in and absorb into the surface.

So I like to use a Plexi. This is called HDPE, which stands for high density polyethylene Plexi. And that is a nice palette, but you can also use a piece of wood that's sealed, you can use a piece of glass, you can use a freezer paper. Now freezer paper is not the same as wax paper. But if you can get freezer paper, and you just rip off a sheet comes in rolls, and you can tape it to any kind of board a piece of cardboard your table. freezer paper works really well.

Another type of palette that I like to use, especially in workshops, is a gray palette or gray pad. There are many different types of palettes Like this, they're disposable. That means that the when you're using the page, when you're finished or it gets crowded, you can just rip the page off and there's another one. So I like that in workshops, you can just keep using the same pad and we knew its page easily. The other thing I like about it is that it's gray and a gray color is perfect for color matching. So, I love using these in videos and workshops, although it's not big enough for me for this video.

Often in workshops, I'll put two together and use it that way. But in this work in this video, I'm going to choose to use this it's just bigger and without a scene going down the middle with two of them. Another option is a store bought palette that comes up there's several different brands and they come with a top on it a lid so that if you're working outdoors landscape painting, you can put your paints in And put the cover back on and if it tilts or something you won't have the paint spill out on something else. I like these but I they come with a foam in them and I don't like the foam. I don't like bouncing pallets. Some people do but without the foam it actually is HDPE the high density polyethylene plastic and works very well as a palette.

Okay, once you pick your favorite type of Paladin, any of those options are great. Once you pick your type of palette now let's use palette in the other definition, which is how are we going to arrange our colors and what colors are we going to pick? When there's hundreds, hundreds of colors. When you go to the art store or the craft store wherever you're going to buy your paints? Do you buy hundreds of paint that would cost a lot of money. What I want to tell you is that you only need six colors plus white.

That is it. To make what I call a full palette, a full palette is basically your primary colors. And I'll define that a little later. Red, yellow and blue. But with just one red, yellow and blue, it's not going to make it for you, you're not going to be able to match every color. However, if you got a warm and a cool red, a warm and a cool yellow, a warm and a cool blue, that's six plus white, that's seven.

I like to add black even though you can match you can mix your own black with those colors. So my full palette is eight fixed colors. That's two of each of the three primaries, plus white and black. Let me go into this a little further. Let's look at primary colors. Okay, here are two reds, to yellows to blues.

If we look at Red, yellow and blue, and say what would be the perfect red, the perfect yellow and the perfect Blue. For us if we just wanted one of each. The perfect red, yellow and blue don't exist in physical form. That's I don't want to sound too metaphysical. But if we think of the perfect red, yellow and blue in our ideal, it comes down to us and the physical world, in paints that are a little warmer and a little cooler of your ideal. So if you can picture in between these two reds is your perfect ideal red that doesn't exist in paint form.

Same with the yellow and same with the blue. But as painters, we can cover our bases by getting a warm and a cool of each color. What do I mean by warm and cool? Well, if we look at these two reds, this is like a cadmium red. This is like a quinacridone red, and I'll explain what those names mean. Soon.

If we look at this, I would call this warm. This red here and I would call this spread cool. This looks like a tomato red. That's Take a warm read and think of big, sorry, think of being cherries as your cool read. And the words warm and cool get a little confusing for some folks. So instead of warm and cool, I like to use the terms leaning towards yellow and leaning towards blue.

So if you look at this warm red, you could say that this red leans towards the yellow. This red leans towards the blue and it works that way for all the colors. So this blue here, this one right here leans towards the red, and this blue leans towards the yellow. Same with the two yellows. This one leans towards blue, like a slightly greenish yellow, and this one leans towards the red, it's a slightly red or orange yellow. So that's our full palette, a warm and a cool of or leaning towards one or the other of the three primary colors.

So let's pick our colors and squeeze the bound on the palette. Here is the white. Here are the two yellows that I'm going to use. By the way I'm using this slow drying paint from golden called open so that once I put the the paints out on the palette, they will stay wet for the whole video and I will talk later about other types of arranging the palette for using watercolor ink and fast dry acrylic but for now, let's just assume for oil painters and slow dry acrylic this palette is going to work. So I've got my white and my two yellows. Gonna use these two blues and I'm gonna use these two reds and a black.

The black was optional, but I like having that. So here are my eight colors. All you need is eight colors for what I call a full palette which will enable you to mix and match any color And I mean any color as long as they're the right warm and cool colors. So let's go over that. First Titanium White is a good white because it's very opaque and I like to have a workhorse white. So I am going to move the tubes out of the way so that I can arrange my palette here I'm using the word palette in terms of an arrangement.

I'll start with the white. Now, what I want to do is squeeze them out in an arc like this. I don't want to put paint right here in front of me or I'll be dragging my clothes through it and everything else. So think of an arch with no bottom. And I'm going to start with the white. I like to go from light to dark.

So I'm going to start with white then go yellow, red, blue and black. So here's my white lips and then I'm going to use a cool yellow for Cool yellow, you can use hands a yellow light or cadmium yellow light. And there's some other new paints on the market but those are the two ones that are the most common and easily to easily attainable in the cool yellow. You want something that looks lemony or almost greenish. This is a warm yellow. This is called Hansa medium hands a yellow medium.

You can also use Cadmium Yellow medium, and those are the only two that I know that are easily attainable. For Red's, the, the first I want to put down is a warm red. Now there's a lot of options in warm red. Notice I'm saving some space in between the colors because I'm going to be adding later some other colors and mixtures. So you don't want to put your colors so tight that you can add things in between so leave lots of space For warm red, this is a pyrole read. You can also use natural red, light or medium.

You can also use cadmium red light or medium. There's a lot of warm red choices. But with the cool red, there's only one and this is it quinacridone magenta. If you don't have quinacridone magenta, you will not be able to mix decent purples, and many other colors too. So quinacridone magenta is a must. For cool red, some people like a lizard in red but it's also darker, and then you would be missing out on your capability of matching color.

So we've got white, we've got our two yellows, we've got our two reds. And now we'll have two blues. For the cool blue or the blue that leans towards red. I'm going to use ultramarine blue and another awesome would be anthropo unknown blue, hard to say, but it's a beautiful cool reddish blue. And for my yellow blue, my blue that leans towards the yellow. I am going to use fellow blue green shade.

And there are no substitutes for this fellow blue green shade is a must. And then I've got black and again I said black was optional because I could mix a yellow, red and blue together and get a really nice black, but I like having it out of the tube too. Now that we have our colors spread out on the palette, we have our arrangement our palette arrangement on the palette, I want to take a moment and talk about the difference between two categories of paints. The chemists call them inorganic and organic. And this is based on the type of pigment that's used. To paint, this is going to sound a little bit scientific.

But it's very important to understand that these two categories of paints act very, very different from each other. And I've got them here I've got both categories represented in this palette, instead of organic and inorganic, I like to say modern and mineral just easier to say. So I'm going to call organic paints, the modern colors, and I'm going to call the inorganic paints, the mineral colors and let me just explain the difference between the two, about 60 years ago. All paints were made from natural sources, bark, soil, dirt, rocks, beetles, and they were all they sound like names that you might sound familiar, like, Burnt Sienna, cadmium ultramarine blue. Those are colors that you would imagine someone like Rembrandt would use That's all the colors that were available up until about 60 years ago. And right about then some of the sources started to get depleted.

For instance, Ultramarine Blue was made from Lapis. And that was getting kind of expensive. So some scientists got together and said, How can we synthetically reproduce Ultramarine Blue instead of using Lapis? How can we make it cheaper and make it synthetic? And they did. And this technology so ultramarine blue, most of your Ultramarine Blue is now synthetic.

But that new technology, it created a whole different type of pigment. If you can imagine a cadmium is a mineral pigment. In a microscope, it looks like a dusty dirty boulder and suspended in the binder in this case acrylic we're using acrylic, whereas this new technology produced pigment that looks like in a microscope. little pieces of stained glass suspended in the body. So in a might in a microscope, they look totally different. And that makes them act very different.

Let's compare to and I'll show you, I am going to compare quinacridone magenta with the cadmium red. Now if we just look at the names of the colors, that's a good clue, but it's not always correct, but in this case, it'll help us decide which one is modern and which ones mineral. If we look at the word cadmium, that sounds familiar, it sounds like something Rembrandt would use. It sounds like something that's been around for a long time and that's true. A cadmium is a mineral color, and it's probably still made from natural sources. Whereas the word quinacridone sounds very modern.

And it is a modern color, any fallow or quinacridone, our modern colors. Some of the other names, you can't really tell but in this case we can. So we know the cadmium is mineral and the quinacridone is modern. Let's look at The two together. I am going to take a magic marker. And I'm going to put black lines down because I want to show you something about the transparency of the two colors.

So here's some black lines. At the top of this one, I'm going to put the cadmium red. At the top of this one, I'm going to click the quinacridone magenta. Okay, so we have the two reds at the top of this board. It's just a piece of GSO cardboard, I just want to show you the difference between the two reds. I'm going to do what's called a draw down, I'm going to take my palette knife and draw down over the black lines.

What do you think? Do you think that's opaque or transparent? The word opaque means that you Can't see through it. And the word transparent means you'd be able to see the black lines underneath. That's pretty, pretty opaque to me, I can't see any of the black lines. Now, if I take this quinacridone magenta, and this one is a mineral color, mineral colors in general have good opacity like that.

If I take this one, and I'm putting it the same way, I drew down that you can see it not only is it transparent, but it's also very streaky. And this is pretty much the definition of between the two. A mineral color has pretty good coverage in evenly applied, whereas a modern gets kind of streaky. Now why is that? Well, let's look at some characteristics of the two paints. A paint has what's called a man's tone, and an undertone that's na SS mass, tone and undertone.

A mass tone is where the color is thick, and an undertone is where it's kind of thin. And you can scrape it to get it thin, or you can rub it with a paper towel. So what I'm trying to do here, if I rub it, now I have a mass tone and an undertone of the cadmium. And they're, they're different. Obviously, this one's more transparent and that's more opaque, but they're still kind of the same color. Whereas with a modern color, when I get a thin version of it next to its thick mass tone.

It's very, very different. And that means that as I painted out, it's going to have a streaky quality because there's a big difference between the mass tone and the undertone. Let's look at what happens when we add white. So if I take some white paint, and in the old days, they basically said don't add white if you want to make something lighter, put it next to something darker because adding white does this watch. If we look at this color, it has Certain, I don't know, I like to think happy quality or brightness to it. As soon as we add some white it gets lighter, but it also gets a little chalky or you could say, kind of limp not so intense, the color gets a little bit boring in a way.

Whereas with the modern color it gets it's pretty dark in a mass tone, and when you add a little bit of white, it really brings out the flavor of the color almost matches the undertone here. So when you're using modern colors, it's really good to know that you need a little bit of white to bring out the colors and I use the word pop. Most people call something a tint when you add a little bit of white you're making a tint. But in the case of a modern color, when you add a little bit of white, you really kind of turning the light on underneath that color and making it bright. Now if I keep adding white to it, it'll just turn into a tint, it'll start to get chalky. So maybe it'll make more sense when I look at my palette.

So with this palette, there are some colors on there that are pretty dark. Here's the quinacridone magenta, and here is the fellow blue and they both look very, very dark. You can even think that this blue is black. So what I like to do when I set up my palette, first thing I want to do is I put a little bit it's important to have a clean palette knife. When you do this. What I want to do is take a little bit of white and put it next to each color like having a little white tail.

And this will tell me whether it's mineral or modern because I'm going to give it a little tint here. So let's see here is the quinacridone magenta with a little bit of white and that really gives me a visual clue. how different it is when I add some white to be original color. And here's the ultramarine blue, which is a mineral color. You can see it's getting very chalky right away. Whereas look at this fellow blue.

Look at how that pops. It's that little bit of white. It's like turning a light on. And even the black. I like to see what it looks like when you add a little bit of white to it. I added a little too much black.

There we go. So for me a full palette when it's finished. Gives me full visual indication of what these colors can do. I'm almost finished. Just gonna look at these yellows. Okay, so I have my paints in an arc in the order that I like.

This is all I need. To match any color I want, and I've given each one what I call a little tail, a little indication of what they really look like when they add when I add a little white. That shows me what the color can really be. Otherwise I just everything could look like black all these modern colors