Just to review: color has three attributes:
1. value (how light or dark it is). For example, if you took a black and white photo of a previously colored picture, you would be able to only see the values. (Of course, you know this, but I have to be complete here.)
2. Hue. The “redness” of the apple is it’s hue. White and black usually not referred to as hues.
3. The INTENSITY (chroma, strength). This is how strong the color is. How red the red is. In general, paints at maximum intensity are said to have a a jewel-like sparkle. I shall be using the term “saturation” as synonymous with “chroma” in this post because much of the thinking about intensity uses this term, but I know some people think it is wrong, and I should use only the term “chroma”. See the chapter Color Theory here for what I think is an easy way to understand terms used to describe colors on both surfaces and from lights.
To have a palette with a wide-range of strong, high chroma, high intensity (in this post they all mean the same thing) colors, you have to know how to avoid “saturation costs”.
saturation costs
“Saturation costs” or “graying” refers to the interference between paints when they are mixed. For example, it is common for people who mix orange from red and yellow to find that the orange is just not as strong, does not have the same saturation, as an orange from the tube.
Saturation costs works this way: Assuming two paints are at their most saturated at the start we know that, if they lie across from each other on the color wheel (hue circle), that is are “complements”, we will get maximum desaturation by mixing them –to the point of no hue at all, that is gray or black. (There has to be some varying of proportions of one paint to the other based on the tintorial strength of the pigment.)
Color wheels are just approximations and work only for the purpose for which they were designed. For example, visual complement color wheels are not the same as mixing complement color wheels. As you might have guessed, describing colors is infinitely more complicated than the color wheel I show above. A more acute and complicated discussion can be found here. However, it is not necessary to understand what is to follow.
There is nothing magical about desaturation from exact complements. What is often overlooked and is more important for our discussion is that there is also a saturation cost, a graying, from mixing every pigment with any other pigment even those close to each other on the color wheel. However, this saturation cost increases the father apart two colors are on the color wheel approaching the farthest apart, the complement, from either direction where the saturation cost breaks the bank, so to speak, and we get no hue at all, no saturation. We get gray or black.
some modern paints desaturate less with mixing
Position on the color wheel is very important, but some paints are less likely to desaturate than others. The cadmium paints desaturate quickly even when mixed with a white. That can make the colors more realistic since in the real world there are rarely high intensity colors. However, the quinachrodone reds, magenta, and violets mix well as do the pyrrol reds and oranges. For example, to make a really hot pink, what Stapleton Kearns calls “Pornstar Pink” use white, quin red, and pyrrol orange. With cadmium orange and red (and white), you wont get that really bright pink.
A palette with the least saturation costs
The fact that the distance between colors on the color wheel is a good way to visualize the amount of desaturation that occurs between colors dictates that the palette with the least saturation costs can be visualized as having a large number of paints equally spaced around the color wheel. (Karen Jurick, an oil painter, uses a disposable pizza plate for a palette that has a huge number of paints placed around the outside. She has a U-tube video of her palette here but makes no mention of saturation. Of course, some of her paints are already desaturated like yellow ochre.) Choosing paints, not the way Jurick does (by availability) but that are equally spaced around the color wheel and at high saturation assumes the same relatively small saturation cost when mixing neighboring paints, and that mixing of neighboring hues should be all you have to do to get the exact hue that you want. (There will be quirks associated with the particular paint.) If you want to dull, some of my friends say “kill”, a paint a bit you can add a paint further away on the color wheel.
The more paints on the palette the less mixing and the more likely that what mixing is going to take place will be with nearby (similarly hued) paints where there is the least saturation cost. (There can be, however, odd reactions between pigments and paints, so beware.) Therefore, following the approach of mixing nearby paints most mixed hues will be a close to maximum chroma or intensity. In addition varying one hue with a hue adjacent on the color wheel will add variety with not much of a saturation cost. For example, dropping in some red violet into a bluer violet passage doesn’t kill the violet color but adds some interesting variety.
To be concrete, many watercolor artists aim for maximum saturation of paints, and this “colorist” look is often associated with watercolors (violet shadows, for example.) This kind of palette usually has about five or more yellows, reds, blues, and violets chosen in a spread from warm to cool .
Yellow is the color that is most fragile and vulnerable to desaturation. You cannot stray far from it on the color circle to do any mixing. In her book “Daring Color” Anne Abgott recommends the follow 6 yellows from specific companies (listed from warm to cool) : Gamboge Nova (Holbein), New Gamboge (Winsor Newton), Naples Yellow (Holbein), Quinacrodone Gold (Winsor Newton), Yellow Ochre (Schmincke Horadam), Aureolin Yellow (Winsor Newton.) As you can imagine, this spread is going to reduce your need to mix yellows. They all lighten with additional water. However, she cautions about using anything but another yellow to darken any of these paints. New Gamboge will darken Naples Yellow and Aureolin, Quinancodone Gold will darken Yellow Ochre, and Yellow Ochre will darken Gamboge Nova. Ann Abgott’s article here (there’s a downloadable PDF worth having) discusses her choices for each hue and is illustrative of this very popular type of watercolor palette. She recommends 7 reds, 5 greens, 7 blues, 6 violets in addition to the 6 yellow mentioned above. If you want to use a saturated palette, her recommendations will work for you particularly if you download and read her article on how to use them mentioned above.
Botanical artists are, perhaps, the group with the most paints. They are not necessarily used in every painting, but to match exact colors which include not only the body color of the flower but the subtle reflections, they need a lot of different starting points.
there’s more to getting your paints at their most saturated (strength)
there are the following considerations
1. the proper dilution
2. glazing
3. adding gum arabic
4. changing water supply
5. cleaning your palette and your brushes
6. the paper you’re using
The proper dilution. Most watercolor paints come out of the tube in what I would call a ”gummy” state that is only good for dry brush work, if that. Out of the tube, used “raw” on paper, there is no luminosity so treasured in watercolor paintings and no paper texture. Brushstrokes leaves marks too easily, the overall quality is a matte surface, and, most importantly the paint is not at its greatest saturation or at the best value whether that is dark or light. To put it simply, the paint is too thick. It has, at least in some spots, a leathery look that is shiny, probably from too much gum arabic on the surface. It doesn’t look like watercolor paint to me because it lies on the surface thickly like a scab. This can happen in puddles on your paper even with dilutions. You’re getting more paint for your money by it being so thick just out of the tube, but you can’t use it that way.
To get maximum saturation it is necessary to add a little water to the tube paint and maybe distribute the water evenly by mixing on a palette a little bit to get a consistent dilution and all water out of the brush into the paint.
How much water is difficult to judge. As a few perceptive painters have pointed out, the paper you are using is an integral part of the equation mostly because the sizing with gelatin is different from brand to brand. A mark with a big kolinsky brush on 140 lb Arches paper will require less water than on 300 lb Arches paper.
Most books suggest dipping a brush in water and giving it a shake or touching it to an absorbent surface (a paper towel or foam rubber) if you don’t want water all over the place. The point is to get the drop of water hanging from the tip of a brush off. Then you pick up paint with the belly of the brush (not the tip because it can wear down and ruin the brush). I think this is too simple a formula, a “one dilution fits all” that won’t work. First of all you have to look at the paint and determine if it’s the fluidity that you want. Try it on a piece of scrap paper. If it isn’t right, add more water or more pigment. Do not depend on the “one shake” rule.
Bruce MacEvoy with his characteristic thoroughness has suggested that you can judge the dilution that will work best by comparing it to liquids we know. His categories are: raw (no dilution) which I would call gummy, syrupy, creamy, fluid, and watery. His research has suggested that paints are most saturated at creamy or fluid concentrations and that you can still get some leathery look at the syrupy consistency. To some extent it depends on particle size of the pigment. Small particle size like the carbon blacks (see my chapter on darks) and Phthalo pigments, for example, do better at fluid dilution.
I find it hard to judge these categories, but I have tried several times to dip a brush in water, cream, and syrup to see if I can determine any thing. The following photograph is a number 14 Kolinsky brush dipped in maple syrup. Look at it.
What you see is a drop that clings to the tip of the brush. Not at all like the full, rounded drop that you can get from water. So, perhaps, this can at least be a warning sign because syrupy is not good. It can lead to even more leathery looks than raw, out of the tube paint.
Charles Reid suggests that you can tell the right dilution (although he is an advocate of the one shake rule) by tilting the palette and seeing how your water and paint mixture flows. At some point every dilution will flow down the palette but the watery dilutions will do so as soon as it is not flat. This is somewhat similar to Jim Kosvanec who suggests diluting until the paint just “beads up” when the palette tips (forms a little ridge at the bottom but doesn’t run freely).
The bottom line is that knowing that you need a certain dilution to get the highest saturation and then reading the characteristic fluidity of the paint is the most important issue. Most of the time you can figure it out without much difficulty. The question simply has to be high enough in consciousness to make you notice the consistency of your paint. If you forget or see that the paint is too think, you can blot it off the paper and start again. The one thing you cannot do is add water to a passage already on the paper. The water will wash a hole in the passage. You can add more paint, however.
Glazing. Another way to increase saturation is to build up layers of transparent glazes. The first glaze has to be completely dry. It is not easy to know when a first glaze is dry as defined as not dissolving into the glaze on top of it. I’ve seem it recommended to let the first glaze dry overnight. Some people used hair dryers. The problem is acute when one wants a high saturation color on an subject such as a flower petal but also a high saturation color on the shadow on that petal accomplished by glazing over the non-shadow color. As one botanical art teacher quipped, “We are lucky that anyone paints anything but other than pale pink sweet peas and lavender clematis, with the odd poppy or sunflower thrown in for good measure!” (that is unsaturated colored blossoms.) in Margaret Stevens, “The Botanical Palette” page 11.
using additional gum arabic
If the paint looks flat or matte (e.g. carbon black) and, therefore, lacks the “sparkle” of highly saturated paint, it can sometimes be remedied by glazing over it a couple of times with a dilution of gum arabic.
Sometimes watercolorists add a few drops of gum arabic to their water for the same reason.
check you water supply
Finally, paint that has found its way into your water supply can desaturate your new paint. I’ve noticed that old paint has the habit on settling on the bottom of my water container and doesn’t necessary wash out when I simply pour the old water out. I have to rub it into solution again with an old brush I keep for that purpose.
Clean your palette (and your brush)
Even a tiny bit of some kinds of paint with high tintorial power left over on your palette can accidently get into another paint and desaturate it. I find this the case particularly with flesh color that I’m mixing because there is often a blue on the palette nearby that I’m using for a shadow color. The blue can muddy or give the flesh color mix a greenish hue.
Paper
Ann Abgott has written in her book and shows an example (see here) that 300 lb watercolor paper shows paints more saturated than 170 lb paper. She attributes in to a difference in “sizing”, the gelatin that is mixed with the paper pulp both inside and on the surface. (The thickness of the paper is measure in weight per ream –when the weight is measured in pounds. No matter how it’s measured the heavier it is, the thicker an individual sheet of paper will be.)
Robert Doak, here, a boutique paint manufacturer, also blames paper for reducing saturation. The paper he blames is made with “animal hide glue”. It’s not clear to me what he means. Most of best watercolor paper is made with gelatin as a size which is derived from animal protein from skin and bones, but it is usually not classified as a glue like “rabbit skin glue.” He markets a special paper for his watercolors (which are liquid). His papers are ”lightly sized” with gelatin. I’ve not tested his paper but that is what is done for “student grade” watercolor paper and the paper preferred by printmakers. He suggests testing his watercolor paints on paper towels which he says are not “sized”. In fact, if you want watercolor paper that is not sized with animal products, I have noticed that Fabriano paper in its promotional description states that no animal byproducts are used in the sizing.
Charles Reid, on the other hand, doesn’t like 300 lb. paper. He feels that 140 lb paper, or even 90 lb. paper, allows him to make a longer mark with the brush and achieve his characteristic “splashy” style. He attributes this to the special sizing formula used for 300 lb. paper which is, in deed, heavily sized.
There is clearly something to having special paper that’s made for watercolors. Without it you will not get the most saturation from your paints, but there seems to be a significant difference between the options. One has to vary the load of the brush with the paper used. As Charles Reid has said, it’s best to stick with one paper that you know well.
It would do well to read the next post about “Do we really want high saturation?”
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