Today’s color exercise is a color blend chart. This will likely extend into being tomorrow’s exercise as well, because it’s not exactly a fast project. I’m going through 20 of the colors in the paint set I bought and doing a color grid of those colors mixed with each other, I’m making a 50/50 blend for each pair of colors, along with the individual colors mixed with a selection of 5 whites and greys (because the piece of paper is rectangular, so it’s a 20×26 grid).

Painting color grid
A better view of the chart in progress.

This also is going to be helpful as I move forward and thin the set to the colors that will end up in my primary palette.

I bought the 36 color set plus a metallics set because it contained most of the colors I remembered from back in the day, and I figured I would experiment with the big set selection and see if any of the additional colors merited being added to my “favorites” list. Some are, like Red and Yellow Oxide. Some not so much, like Medium Magenta, which is just LOUD, or Cadmium Orange, which is perfectly easy to mix from other colors, so doesn’t need to use up prime real estate on it’s own.

You can see here the current setup I have on my painting table and palette. The magnifying glass is because the text on the tubes of paint is TINY.

My palette and painting table setup.

The boxed paint set in the background is the Blick Studio Acrylics 36 color set. (Note: this is NOT an affiliate link. I’ve applied for an affiliate account but am still waiting.

https://www.dickblick.com/items/blick-studio-acrylics-set-of-36-colors-21-ml-tubes/

I currently have a ridiculous number of acrylic paint colors, clocking in at about 30 or so unique colors on the standard color wheel, another 6 for the earth-tone and brown spectrum (yellow oxide, red oxide, siennas and umbers), another 6 metallics (gold/copper/silver/bronze/iridescent white/iridescent graphite), and an array of 2 whites, 2 blacks, and a grey. So, yikes, 50 colors. Like I said, ridiculous. Most of that is because of the multi-pack sets I bought, coupled with a small set that I had bought a few years back that was still good. The game plan is to use up all the extraneous colors, and then just not replace the most of them. I think once all is said and done, I’ll be down to about a dozen on the wheel, along with still keeping the earth-tones, a selection of metallics, and the black/white/grey array. So I’ll end up I think with a full palette of about 30, once all is said and done. Though I won’t necessarily use the full palette on every painting.

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