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Premixing a palette
Steve:
Yes, it takes some time to pre-mix Greene's set of colors, but not 45 minutes. It used to take me quite some time, but now, I can do the whole thing in just a few minutes. For me, it is a bit like a piano player doing a few scale exercises before playing music.
And, after years of using Greene's method, it is surprising how many of those colors you bump into on a subject. And, it's really not difficult to customize any of these pre mixed colors. For example, a tot of black or raw umber into yellow ocher will give you some of those curious greens, or a little alizarin into his cad red mixure will give you a different red . . . and on and on.
It was, and still is, nice to have a bunch of "general" flesh tones laying there that I can pick up and use as is, or alter with nothing more than the addition of a dab of something else.
Please understand, I'm not promoting his, or any other system. It's just that when I started, I didn't now flesh tone from anything else. I was so surprised, in my first Greene painting demo, when he picked up a wad of his dark mahogany shadow tone (aliz crim - sap green -- cad yel med) and put it on his canvas! And then, he started using reds and yellows and oranges! I thought flesh was flesh toned -- I just had no idea what that was.
Now, like you, I often start in with a clean palette, mixing what I need. But, if it's going to be a long session, or a session with many considerations, I find that Greene's premixed batches of color help me by eliminating some of these decisions.
He was/is right when he talks about how he visited museums to find all these colors, in that it is quite surprising how much of the time these are, indeed, the colors you run into in painting flesh.
Nice talking to you. Have a nice day.
Dick Budig
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