24 Essential Colors

On First Practice
Sketching from Nature
On Color and Composition

ON color AND COMPOSITION

I insist upon this unalterability of color the more because I address you as a beginner, or an amateur: a great artist can sometimes get out of a difficulty with credit, or repent without confession. Yet even Titian's alterations usually show as stains on his work. It is, I think, a piece of affectation to try to work with few colors: it saves time to have enough tints prepared without mixing, and you may at once allow yourself these twenty-four. If you arrange them in your color-box in order I have set them down, you will always easily put your finger on the one you want.

Cobalt	Smalt	Antwerp Blue	Prussian blue
Black	Gamboge Emerald green	Hooker's green	Lemon yellow
Cadmium yellow	Yellow ochre	Roman ochre	Raw sienna
Burnt sienna	Light red	Indian red Mars orange	Extract of vermilion
Carmine	Violet carmine	Brown madder	Burnt umber
Vandyke brown	Sepia

Antwerp blue and Prussian blue are not very permanent colors, but you need not care much about permanence in your work as yet, and they are both beautiful; while Indigo is marked by Field as more fugitive still, and is very ugly. Hooker's green is a mixed color, put in the box merely to save you loss of time in mixing gamboge and Prussian blue. No. 1 is the best tint of it. Violet carmine is a noble color for laying broken shadows with, to be worked into afterwards with other colors.
If you wish to take up coloring seriously you had better get Field's Chromatography at once; only do not attend to anything it says about principles or harmonies of color; but only to its statements of practical serviceableness in pigments, and of their operations on each other when mixed, etc.

Continue to Mixing Colors

Get all the animals listed on this site in an easily printable format. BONUS: Also learn how to draw mice, monkeys, butterflies and a phoenix. Instant download. $3.95