Are you a beginner and having trouble understanding which colors to use for your palette? You always have doubts on how to mix colors to achieve the desired color? When you mix colors you always get muddy colors?

Are you a beginner painter and you do not know which colors to buy? Are you always confused whenever you have to choose the colors to paint your subject? The following article will show you which colors to use in your painting and how to build your own palette.

In the Primary, secondary and complementary colors article I defined what a primary color is. The primary colors are: red, yellow and blue. Reading whatever book you will find that mixing primary colors you can get whatever color. This is partly true and the reality is much more complex. However, the simplest palette you can use is the one composed by only primary colors. I call this palette Primary Colors Palette.

Photo from http://www.portraitinstitute.com

John Howard Sanden is an American portrait painter member of the famous Portrait Institute, an organization that originally held an annual conference for 5 days on the portrait. From the artist’s website you can see his works, honors received, customers, and other information. It’s interesting to read how the artist has been selected by the staff of the White House to paint the portrait of the 43 rd U.S. President George W. Bush.

What is the verdaccio color? How it can help artists to make better portraits? Did you know that this color was fundamental for artists such as Giotto, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael?

In the color article I defined what a color is and I defined its three dimensional nature.  Moreover, I said, at the end of the article, that to understand the color of an object you must always ask yourself four questions.

Leonardo, in his Treatise on Painting, expressed some thoughts about primary colors that he called “simple color”. First of all, he said that the following are the simple colors: yellow, red and blue (the primaries) with black and white plus two colors like green and blue that actually are not simple.

The color is a three-dimensional size and the classical color wheel is not sufficient to represent the entire color space. However, to explain the concepts of primary, secondary and complementary colors it is, probably, the best tool we can use. In painting, primary colors are those that can not get from mixing of other colors.