How to Prep the Color Palette Before Landscape Painting

Video Transcript

"Hello, I am Matt Cail and on behalf of Expert Village I am going to show you today how to do a landscape painting. With our painting prepped and ready to go with a charcoal sketch it is easy just to jump right in and say, "Hey, let's get painting!" and for some folks hey that works great for them. I prefer to plan out the painting a little bit more than that and that goes back to getting our palette ready. Hey, there's nothing more interesting than a used palette, but you want to make sure that you have some paper on here. So, we are going to get rid of this. A lot of this palette paper you can buy in a store. Heck, after you used it may be its own little work of art. Tack it up on the wall as an accomplishment for yourself. We are actually going to create our own palette and I am going to go over the paints that we are going to be using for this painting today. So I put down a new piece of nice clean palette paper so we can start with a nice clean slate. What I am going to do is put down various dollops of paint. Now it is sometimes very hard to estimate exactly how much paint you need. Sometimes it is a bit of guess work. If you have one of these nice palette boxes these come with lids that you then snap on over it. It will keep oil paints good up to probably a week or so. If you really good one maybe up to a month because oil paints will dry up over time. What we are going to do is put basically separate now and have a line of red warm colors: red, brown, yellow, oranges. Although I am not going to use all of those today. And cool colors: green, blues, purples, that sort of thing. I am going to start by a dollop of paint right here, it does not have to be tons. You can always go back and add more. Make sure you always very, very tightly put back on your lid back on the tube of paint. Make sure it is really tight; hey paint is not always cheap. You don't want to go buy a new thing just because you left the lid on loose. That is not good. Then we are going to go over here with Cerulean Blue. Sometimes you will have as you can see some clear liquid, sometimes that will separate in the paint. I know some artists who like to take a tube of paint and they'll they mix it a bit in there before opening it up. I have had the unfortunate experience of doing that having the paint explode out of the sides and the bottom because sometimes these tubes are strong, but not that strong. I don't always recommend that. What we are going to continue to do is basically build our palette across here and having it all ready. The colors that we are going to be using are: Venetian Red, Titanium White, Permanent Rose (which is great for sunsets and sunrises), Ivory Black (for some of those shadings), Raw Sienna, Cerulean Blue, Viridian Green, and Ultramarine Blue. A lot of these are going to be great for skies. Also, we have Sap Green and more on our other side here Burnt Umber which is really good for forests, rockery and general landscape."