Mini Pans; Many Paints
Lisa Spangler shares her newest Folio Palette, dedicated to the exploration of color and perfect for capturing botanical observations wherever she goes.
By Lisa Spangler
Hi friends! If you know me, you’ll know that I absolutely love exploring color—from nerding out over pigments and fiddling with my palettes to changing them up with the seasons and the locations where I’m painting. I set up this palette as a way to play with color and to use up all the tubes of paints I had sitting in a drawer.
Palette Colors
All of my paints are Daniel Smith unless specified otherwise: H = Holbein, WN=Winsor and Newton, LS = Letter Sparrow. They are listed by row and column, clockwise starting at the top left corner.
Top row: Azo Yellow (PY151), Hansa Yellow Medium (PY97), Permanent Yellow Deep (PY110), Quinacridone Coral (PR209), Quinacridone Rose (PV19), Quinacridone Magenta (PR122, WN), Potter’s Pink (PR233), Organic Vermillion (PR188), Pyrrol Red (PR254), Quinacridone Burnt Scarlet
Right side: Deep Scarlet (PR175), Venetian Red (PR101), Transparent Red Oxide (PR101), Piemontite Genuine, Indigo (PB60, PBk6)
Bottom row: Bloodstone Genuine, Vivianite (Blue Ochre, LS), Van Dyck Brown (PBr7), French Ultramarine Blue (PB29, WN), Smalt (PB15, WN), Phthalo Blue (Green Shade, PG7), Chromium Oxide Green (PG17), Peacock Blue (PB15 + PG7, H), Cobalt Turquoise Light (PG50, WN)
Left side: Chinese white (PW4), Yellow Ochre (PY42, H), Raw Umber (PBr7, WN), Nickel Azo Yellow (PY150)
Do I need this many colors? Heck, no! I’m perfectly content with a limited palette, and that’s what I use most of the time. Do I love having this many colors? Heck, yeah! It feels like a decadent luxury :)
I mainly use this Sketcher Fest Folio Palette in my perpetual journal for botanical studies. As soon as I saw this green palette, I just had to have it go along with the botanical theme and match the Duotone Forest Pocket Art Toolkit (which we hope to restock soon)!
My perpetual journal is handmade by Lindsey Mears and has Fabriano Artistico 100% cotton hot press watercolor paper. I hope to use it for 5-7 years. Plus it’s been an awesome way to document all the cool plants I find on our travels in the van. I had kept one before for three years using two Hahnemühle 100% cotton sketchbooks—one isn’t enough to cover all 52 weeks in a year. These journals are expensive up front but, with the perpetual journal format, it will last many, many years. I’m looking forward to filling it up with all the cool plants I find while traveling full time in our van!
About the Palette
This Folio Palette has a rainbow of colors in 28 (!) Mini Pans and two XL Mixing Pans. I dedicate one to mixing greens and the other to neutrals — think browns, grays, and darks. I never clean these out, as I find having a little extra color in your mix makes them more lively and realistic. I use the lid for mixing all the rest.
Cheat Sheets
With this many colors, I’ve found that I have to have cheat sheets to know what’s what! This is something I don’t have to do with my limited palettes.
I trimmed a piece of Arches cold press paper to form a mini booklet, swatched the colors on the first page, and labeled them.
Then, I made cheat sheets for my go-to green and neutral mixes on the inner two pages.
My favorite green mixes are:
Phthalo Green + Permanent Yellow Deep = a beautiful sap green
Cobalt Turquoise Light + Venetian Red = the perfect opaque blue-green for cacti, agaves, and yuccas
Phthalo Green + Transparent Red Oxide = pine green (add a little indigo to turn it more of a perylene green color
Chromium Green Oxide + Phthalo Green = a rich, granulating green
Chromium Green Oxide + any yellow = a granulating sap green
My favorite neutral mixes are:
Ultramarine Blue (or French Ultramarine Blue) + Transparent Red Oxide = a beautiful gray that you can easily turn warmer or cooler
Indigo + Venetian Red = a moody dark
Van Dyck Brown + Yellow Ochre = an interesting brown for winter foliage
Quinacridone Burnt Scarlet mixed with Phthalo Green = a warm grey, great for botanical studies where I’ve used either of these already
Pocket Art Toolkit
My palette lives in a Duotone Forest Pocket Art Toolkit, along with the rest of the pens I use in my perpetual journal, including:
A Pentel Aquash Waterbrush with a fine point and a pipette for filling it with water
Kakimori mechanical pencil filled with fine 2mm lead (the sharpener is in one of the pockets on the right)
Copic multiliner SPs in sizes 0.1, 0.03, and 0.05 — I love that these are refillable, including changing out the nibs!
2 mini binder clips and a shop towel
I hope this sparks you to build your own palette to explore colors!
~ Lisa
All photos courtesy of Lisa Spangler.