Hi, I'm Nancy Rainer. Thank you for joining me for this video where we explore my favorite painting techniques that rely on color. These techniques are all based on my book create perfect paintings. In the book, I emphasize variety, and variety is what adds a visual interest to your painting. And the key to getting variety in your painting is by starting with a full palette, and that is what I have here. And let me just talk about how I set this palette up.

So what I have here is white, and black, and two reds, to yellows to blues. So the primary colors are red, yellow and blue. And instead of finding just one perfect red one, perfect yellow one perfect blue. I have a warm and a cool of each of those primaries, to give me maximum potential to create variety in my color mixing and my painting So, here's what I've got. I've got more than that too but let me just start with the warm and cool of each primary here is a warm and a cool yellow. This is hands a yellow medium, and this is hands a yellow light.

You can see that the, what I call the cool yellow is the yellow that looked a little bit greenish like a lemon yellow. And the what I call the warm yellow is one that looks like it leans towards the orange or red little bit. So those two are very important, a warm and a cool yellow. And then I'm going to jump over here on the palette to a warm and a cool red. I'm using here Pyro red. You can also use a natural red medium or light, a Cadmium Red medium or light.

There's lots of choices with warm reds. Again, this one is Pyro red, but here I only recommend using for the cool red quinacridone magenta. And now let's move over to the blues over here the two blues This is ultramarine blue, and sometimes I will substitute instead of Ultramarine Blue I'll use anthro Ecwid known blue and that is a blue that looks a little purple layer or has a little bit red in it. Here we have a fellow blue green shade and the title, the name of the paint clues you into the fact that it leans towards the green. And so I've got two yellows, two reds, two blues. I also have white and I mentioned black.

This is Titanium White and carbon black. Carbon Black is optional. I like to have it as a convenience color on my palette because you can mix it with other paints on this palette. So that would be the full palette. Now the extra added colors that I have an extra added mixtures. You can see the mess over here added mixtures are what I call making the full palette into an enhanced full pallet and enhanced full pallet is something that I like to work with because it gives me even more options to add variety into my color mixing, color matching and my painting.

So let me explain what I did. Here, I took my titanium white, and because there's a big jump in value or tone between the white and the yellow. For me, that's a big jump. I need more light values. I like light values in my paintings. I think they're very important.

I call them the eye gems. They're where our eye as a viewer moves in the painting. And I like to use the term I choreography as a painter, I feel like that's what I'm doing with my paintings. I'm creating a choreography so the light values are like I gems, and so instead of just using white, and then yellow would be my only other option for light values. I pre mix some light values. So I take the white, I put it in three places here between the white and the yellow.

Also, my palette is set up light To dark and in an arc, leaving this area empty so that I don't keep getting it on my clothes and hands while I'm working. And I added a little bit of yellow to this one, a little bit of red to this and a little bit of blue to this. It's very subtle. In fact, with this lighting, and the cameras, it might actually all look white, but when you use it in the painting really makes a difference and adds more of those I gems. So those are all pretty close to a white. I then divided these and pushed them over here and added a little bit more of the yellow to this one a little bit more of the red to this and a little more blue.

So if you think of a value scale from one to 10, one being white and 10 being black, we now have all these choices in ones and these are like a two or maybe even a three and then we jumped to yellow which is really like a four and then all the way to 10 which is a black here.