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    The inspiration for this month's post was spawned by last month's blog and is dedicated to my fellow chroma nerds. I've long included on my palette several color choices that aren't typical for a standard palette. While it is perfectly acceptable to choose colors for no other reason than because you like them and find them useful, I thought I'd take a moment to explain what I find helpful about these additional pigments. More specifically, I'm talking about some of the options on the cool side of the color wheel, such as Permanent Rose, Permanent Magenta and Dioxazine Purple. While these colors seem very vivid, and they are, when painting flowers up close even the most chromatic options on our palette can pale in comparison to what nature has to offer. Although values will always be the greatest limitation with our paints, the other two properties of color (chroma and hue), have their limitations as well.

     To recap some of what I talked about in the previous blog, different pigments will be at their strongest chroma at different places on the value scale. Yellow is unusual as a pigment in that it is the only one that is at its most chromatic in the very lightest values. For that reason, secondary color mixtures such as orange and green that can be created using yellow, typically will also end up very chromatic. With my usual palette, a combination of Cadmium Scarlet and Cadmium Yellow will be very close in chroma to any of the orange pigments as they come from the tube. Ditto with Permanent Green -- mixing Viridian with Cadmium Yellow Pale or Cadmium Lemon will produce a green as chromatic as many of the greens that are available in a tube. If I wanted to get out some Pthalo Blue or Pthalo Green, it would be possible to create even more chromatic mixtures, but I seldom run into a situation in my work where I'm wanting to emphasize the greens and blues to that degree. 

    The place I find the greatest limitation in chroma is with the cool reds and purples and this is why I have several versions of those colors represented on my palette. Working with subject matter on this side of the color wheel, at some point I will usually come face to face with the limitations of my paints and be forced to find a compromise between giving up some of the color or giving up some of the light. Representational painting is always a matter of creating illusions but when it comes to colors in this area of the spectrum our materials are more challenging than ever.  The cool colors cannot be lightened using yellow without changing their hue, so our only option is to lighten the value using white or use them transparently. Unfortunately adding white has its drawbacks too because, especially in the case of magenta, the chroma quickly gets diluted and it's quite easy to end up with pink flowers rather than magenta ones. This problem is only made more difficult when working with a basic palette since the mixtures of Alizarin and Ultramarine are a fairly dramatic step down in chroma compared to pure Quinacradone or Dioxazine pigments. Below are some examples I've created to illustrate this difference.

At the top is the most chromatic mixture I could create using a standard palette. Basically it's Rembrandt Permanent Madder Deep (a.k.a. Permanent Alizarin Crimson) with a touch of Ultramarine Blue applied in varying degrees of transparency. Below that is pure Winsor Newton Permanent Magenta and you can see how relatively neutral the previous mixture is in comparison. To the far right on each strip is the same note of paint mixed with white to illustrate how the chroma gets diluted in the high tints. For some really brilliant magenta flowers like cyclamen or orchids, the transparent color with white canvas coming through is the only way I know of to come close to capturing that vivid color. The lights and shadows end up being merely suggested due to the chroma limitations.

In this example of purple, at the top is again is the best choice of a mixture that can be found on most basic palettes --- Alizarin and Ultramarine -- but I've added more blue to approximate the same hue as Dioxazine Purple (a.k.a. Winsor Violet). Notice how the transparent notes are the most chromatic statement and the chroma drops when more than a small amount of white is added.

     I have chosen the various colors on my palette so I'll have the widest range of possibilities I'm interested in given the subject matter I'm usually working with. Obviously I don't use all of these individual colors at full chroma strength in every painting, but I really like having the option to use any one of them if the situation calls for it. Also, I'll point out that just because I have Permanent Magenta and Dioxazine Purple doesn't mean I never use mixtures of Alizarin and Ultramarine. Indeed , those reliably less chromatic notes can be the ideal way to indicate the same color further back in the composition or, for example, a flower outside of the center of interest that I'm not wanting to call as much attention to. Used in that way, the slightly more neutral areas can accentuate the more chromatic notes and help in establishing a strong center of interest. Understanding the limits of our materials is the key to using them to their best advantage.