My Favourite Colours

I find it very difficult to state my favourite things, be it food, location, movie, and so on. The reason I dislike offering one answer to ‘What’s your favourite”-type questions is simply that I like so many things for so many different reasons that it is impossible to nail it down to just one answer. My favourites are almost all situation-dependent. Except chocolate. It’s always good. 

Today I would like to share about my favourite colours of paint. Each favourite belongs to a certain category. Just because I love lime green does not mean I want to paint my living room that colour, or that I look good painting my eyes such a vibrant shade. Side note: my sister once painted her bedroom a very vivid lime green. Though it seemed a funky, fun idea at the beginning, the glowing, almost pulsing walls didn’t offer a peaceful haven.

Looking at my palette just now, I noted again how frequently I return to a few favourite colours in my art. It was back in college that I produced a piece for a technical illustration project that was meant to explain the workings of different kinds of hinges. I chose to create a kind of mad scientist character, and due to the sorts of hinges I featured, I wanted a kind of nostalgic, old feel to the poster. It was during that project that I discovered how much I loved yellow ochre and burnt sienna working in tandem.  They seemed like a good combination for a sepia-toned, warm, lost-treasure-map sort of feel.

The college project in which I discovered how much I like the warm tones created when using Yellow Ochre and Burnt Sienna together.

I also had a painting course in which I learned the glorious truth that a beautiful, deep, dark, almost black (but less harsh) could be achieved by mixing Payne’s Grey and Burnt Sienna. Students had to do entire grey scale paintings using those colours along with white. The use of a pure black, right out of the paint tube was forbidden. Such pure blacks can be extremely distracting in a painting because they are so overbearing; they become the focal point because of their intensity. Most dark, shadowy areas in real life are composed of all sorts of different colours that, when combined, make for a much more rich, dynamic “black” than boring old Mars Black.

Thus, with my newfound knowledge, I added Payne’s Grey to my other two favourites, which allowed me to get a nice dynamic range of cool darks to warm lights. To this day, I use that colour trio in most paintings I create.  They are such an earthy, natural collection of pigments.  I don’t particularly like them on their own, but when used together – wow! I just love the mix.

My most frequently used trio of colours (Burnt Sienna, Paynes Grey, and Yellow Ochre

So those are my go-to paints. I augment them, of course, with other colours (particularly greens, which I also love), but I always feel very at home with them. As my style develops and as I move through different subject matter, that trio may take a bit of a break, but for now, I still very much gravitate to those seemingly boring colours. Together, they are magical!