In 1976, I purchased “The Artist’s Handbook of Materials and Techniques” by Ralph Mayer, recommended by a respected instructor who said “it is the only book of its kind you will ever need.”

Too many years later I came to understand how naive I had been. Painting books proliferated on my shelves, laden with texts on methods, history, biography, theory, quotations, aesthetics, and yes, materials and techniques.

Paint is physical. Making color charts is a good way to see how paints look and interact. For a long time I worked with ten or twelve colors at a time including earths, cadmiums, lights, darks, transparent and opaque, and the era’s strongest prohibition, black.

In 2005, an experienced painter introduced me to limited palettes of three or four colors: a red, yellow and blue, plus white, alternating black to convincingly behave as blue, swapping an earth burnt sienna for a modern cadmium to produce a Renaissance mix.

After reading Tad Spurgeon’s website (discontinued in 2023) on all things color, oils, paints, and mediums, and his exceptional book ‘Living Craft: A Painter’s Process’, I added a second triad in 2008, doubling the limited palette to a warm and cool of each primary. Oil paints made by Winsor & Newton, Rembrandt, Holbein, Sennelier, Gamblin.

An excellent history and my favorite history of manufactured color is the book “Bright Earth” by Philip Ball, published by the University of Chicago Press, 2001. It is an exciting narrative of the evolution and chemistry of artists’ pigments.

ABOVE: Complementary Colors Chart: lemon yellow, cadmium yellow deep, quinacridone, vermilion, cerulean, ultramarine, flake white; oil on canvas panel, 10 x 10 in (25.4 x 25.4 cm), 5/3/2008

BELOW: Color Chart Mixes and Tints: lemon yellow, cadmium yellow pale, quinacridone, vermilion, cerulean, ultramarine, flake white; oil on canvas panel, 11 x 14 in (27.94 x 35.56 cm), 5/19/2008