By Jane Blundell

When working with watercolour, we can easily be seduced by all those gorgeous little blocks of colour and end up with too many colours to choose from. The result is a frustrating experience and may produce a painting with no colour harmony.

With an understanding of how to work with just two or three pigments to create the colours you need, the colour choices are made easily, and the colour harmony is a given.

The simplest idea is to work with a single colour and explore tone in watercolour. This works well when using a strong colour such as a deep grey, deep blue, deep brown or black.

The next exercise to explore is to work with two colours. A pair of opposites gives the most range as you can create a grey or black by mixing them together, or work with each colour in high chroma, mixed or diluted.

This study was completed using just Burnt Sienna and Ultramarine. Mixed, they create deep browns, deep blues and lovely greys. Exploring the colour mixes is fascinating and you’ll discover some wonderful mixes along the way. You can see here that you can create burnt umber hues, warm indigo, Jane’s grey and some lovely skin tones.

You can expand this colour pair by using a bright orange such as Transparent Pyrrol Orange, Quinacridone Burnt Orange or a mixed orange for subjects with even higher chroma colours such as brightly coloured orange and blue birds.

Simple mixing opposites might be a red and a green, a purple and a yellow or an orange and a blue. They need to be exactly the right hue to create a deep black or grey though. A well-chosen pair of colours is often enough to capture a subject, as each colour can cast the other in shadow, producing vibrant hues and deep shadows.

Here is another onion created almost entirely with a pair of perfect mixing opposites, this time Pyrrol crimson and Phthalo green BS. This pair of colours creates rich deep maroons and gorgeous deep cool greens along with a true black. Many of these mixes can replicate a number of pigments and colours, reducing the number of colours in your palette and reducing the confusion about what colour to use next. You can see Perylene Green and Perylene Maroon hues, soft cool greens, aubergine, greys and a neutral.

Working with three colours, especially a primary triad, adds another huge range of possibilities. If I had to paint for the rest of my life using just three colours, a mid-yellow such as Hansa Yellow Medium, a rose, such as Quinacridone Rose and a blue such as Ultramarine would give me almost all the colours I’d want to paint with. I refer to this as a Basic Primary Triad, and you can see some of the possibilities in this chart. When working with a triad like this, the colour choices are simple. If you need more red, it is Quinacridone Rose. More blue? Ultramarine.

Change the colours to an earthy triad and you change the mood. For many urban subjects and distant landscapes the brighter colours are less useful and these lovely earth colours can give wonderful texture. A well-chosen triad will have three primary colours that are matched in their characteristic.

This simple one colour, mixing opposite pair or primary triad approach encourages you to focus on mastering colour mixing and tonal values, rather than being distracted by a wide palette. By limiting your selection, you learn how to push the colours to their limits, creating luminous washes, subtle neutrals, and vibrant contrasts. It is an excellent exercise for both beginners and seasoned artists seeking to refine their technique and enhance their understanding of colour relationships.