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What’s On Your Palette?
A Simple & Essential Concept For Mixing Color
Marco Bucci
March 25, 2025
In partnership with
Art Tips
You are probably already familiar with the concept of a ‘palette’ (it’s simply the selection of hues you have to mix with.) With traditional media, choosing a palette is among the first considerations. And traditional palettes are often limited, for a number of reasons. You may not want to squeeze out every color onto your mixing surface, because handling all those mixtures can get complicated. Or maybe you simply don’t own every color, so you’re stuck with the paints you’ve got. That physical limitation very much hastens the traditional artist’s familiarity with how colors mix.
One of the drawbacks of digital painting is that it’s easy to miss that learning. With digital, we have an unlimited amount of every color for free. And you don’t have to mix color at all - you can simply pick color - a very different interaction! So here’s the tip directly from the traditional world.
Divide each primary into two: ‘red’ becomes warm-red (closer to orange), and cool-red (closer to violet.) ‘Yellow’ becomes warm-yellow (closer to red), or cool-yellow (closer to green.) When you want a mixture to retain its saturation, it must be two hues that are relatively close together, and on the same ‘side’ as each other. For example, to mix a saturated orange, you need a warm-red and a warm-yellow. If any of those colors are on the other side - such as mixing a cool-red with a warm-yellow, you will still get orange, but it will be a much grayer version.
You can use this concept in your digital paintings! Look at the colors you’re using - particularly the saturated ones - and ask yourself if those colors would naturally appear that saturated, within the context of the rest of your palette. If not, simply gray them down! This will help give your work a more traditional and natural look and feel. Try it!
In the Studio: What I’m Creating
Last week I did a figure drawing livestream on my YouTube channel, and it was tons of fun! So many of my videos are hyper-condensed with information (by design). But doing more livestreams, I’m noticing that having a more ‘eased’ approach is also appealing, and presents different ways of learning. I am working on my new course, ‘Total Guide To Figure Drawing,’ with this in mind. It will still be packed with information and edited for optimal pace, of course, but I hope to deliver the material in a more ‘live’ type of way.
The Art Industry: AI “art”
I’ve been invited to do some guest-lecturing at a fairly big art school, along with several other professional artists in various aspects of the entertainment industry. We had a preliminary meeting recently, to plan an overview for our talks. One of the topics (of course) was AI. Naturally, students are worried about it, and they want to know from experienced artists how it’s impacting the industry. So we did an early round-table, sharing our experiences with it. I was heartened to hear, pretty much unanimously, that AI is generally not seen as ‘good enough’ to simply do anyone’s work. Most of the artists reported that they are sent (and some generate) images as a moodboarding tool, while the bulk of the actual work is done the regular way.
Now, I do not use AI at all in my process. I don’t like it, and I don’t need it. Hard stop. However, at least two clients have sent me AI-generated images as early reference. In both cases, they explicitly told me the images were AI, and once I did my own first pass on the art, AI never entered the workflow again. I suppose this is good news, so I wanted to share it.
Worth Checking Out: How Common Things Work
Something that happened to me once I bought my own home almost eight years ago was that I suddenly developed a rather large interest in understanding how common things work.
How does the electricity at a panel work? How does the water heater work? How does a fridge stay cold inside? How do the oven and microwave work?
Naturally, YouTube is perfect for this type of stuff, and along my journey I found what is now one of my absolute favourite channels: Technology Connections. Alec (the host) seems to have spent most of his life understanding how tons of stuff works, and is great at explaining it. So here - check out this video on how the common light-switch works. You might be surprised at how entertaining it is…and how much clever design you have simply taken for granted your whole life!
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P.S. Have you seen this? We have a new deal on the store: the Painting in Watercolor Bundle!
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