“Please can you pass me the Paynes Grey” - Why this student made our day!

As a child I have a very vivid memory of an experience I had of making purple.

Blue and red makes purple – doesn’t it? Well that’s what I’m doing, but it looks dirty, almost grey. I would try different ratios and different combinations butI could never create the purple I wanted. It was a colour I couldn’t seem to make.‍

No one taught me that PIGMENTS matter.‍

Red and blue make purple, yellow and blue make green, yes? We all know our colour theory, and its
exactly that- its THEORY, not colour FACT.

We want our students to know about colour, which colours are single pigment, and which are not, and what happens when we mix them – when we refer to colour, we refer to the hue, it’s never just a blue or a yellow, we call each colour by name so the students understand how to make that gorgeous purple they want or a vibrant green. We are setting them up to succeed by teaching them the quality of colour and pigments, and more importantly with this understanding they can apply their learning to their projects at home.

Here’s some our top colours that we like to use with our students’

(We like to use Windsor and Newton as we just love the pigmentation - colours vary with different brands)

(Yellows) Yellow Ochre, Process Yellow, Cadmium Yellow

(Reds) Magenta

(Blues) Phthalo Blue, Cyan

(Darks) Payne’s Grey, Prussian blue, Raw Umber

(Lights) Titanium white

We are always experimenting, both adding to and removing the colours we are using in our palettes and that’s important too!

There is a wide spectrum of beautiful pigments out there all for the taking and we love selecting a new colour every so often and working with it in different ways to see what it can do. That’s a great way of building your knowledge and your perfect palette.

If you are interested in learning more about pigments we recommend going over to Jacksons Art Blog to find out all about the history of pigments and their use in studio practise.

Studio and General Archives - Jackson's Art Blog (jacksonsart.com)

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