Trial Of The Reds

It’s that time of year when my mind turns to selecting a squad of colours to occupy my palette.  Well, one of my palettes.  I have a palette of 24 Winsor & Newton half pans and a palette of 12 full pans of Winsor & Newton tube paint.  This is all about those 12 full pans and, in particular, the reds that will be in those pans.  Full details of the squad will follow in a later post.

At this point I’ve already decided that there will be three reds in the palette.  One will be quinacridone magenta (obviously) and the other two will be chosen from Winsor red, permanent rose and rose dore.  And the only way to choose will be via trials.

So I decided to do swatches of all four reds and to look at how they mixed with my three favourite blues, my three favourite yellows and the only green in my palette.  To impose a bit of structure on things, I used masking tape to divide up a sheet of watercolour paper into areas to perform the trials.  So there are four corners on the sheet.  The cool reds are on the left: quinacridone magenta at the top and permanent rose at the bottom.  The warm reds are on the right: Winsor red at the top and rose dore at the bottom.  Within each corner there’s a beetle.  From left to right along the top are the three blues: French ultramarine, cerulean and Prussian.  From left to right along the bottom are the three yellows: transparent, raw sienna and Indian.  The heads of the beetles are viridian.

I found this to be a really interesting exercise.  I think I’ve decided which of the reds won’t make it to the final squad but I’m going to sleep on it.  Do let me know if you have your own opinions on this!

And what I’ve ended up with is almost a work of art in itself.  Because it goes right up to the edges of the paper, it’s not really suitable for framing but it’s given me some ideas for a future painting with nine beetles using three blues, three yellows, viridian and my final choice of three reds.  And a lot of masking tape or masking fluid.  Maybe even some masking fluid spatters.