Vermilion is so strong a color that the cost hardly matters. Of the deep blues the same
is true. But the light yellows, and the madders and cobalt, will often make you groan at
the rapidity of their disappearance. But you can get more tubes of them, and their work
remains, while you were to use the cheaper paints, the flight of the color from the
canvas would make you groan more, and that disappearance can never been made good
except by doing the work all over.
Sizes. - The cheapest colors come in the largest tubes. In the illustration, No. 3
represents the full size of the ordinary tube of the average cost.
Some of the most commonly used colors come in larger tubes at corresponding price. Only
professionals get the large sizes except in the case of white. You use so much of this color that it
hardly pays to bother at all with the ordinary tube of it. Get the quadruple tube, which is nominally
four times as large, but contains nearly five times as much.
No. 2 represents the actual size of the second size of tubes in which a few regular-priced colors
come in; while the smallest tube is the size of No. 1. In this sized tube all the high-priced colors are
put up; the cadmiums, the madders, vermilions, and ultramarines and cobalts. The cheap colors are
the ordinary earths, such as the ochres, umbers, siennas, the blacks and whites, and all sorts of greens
and blues and lakes, which you had betters nothing to do with.
Arrangement. - In the following palettes I shall give the names of the colors, as you would look
down upon them on your palette. The arrangement is that a good many painters, and is a convenient
one. It is as well to arrange them with white at the right, then the yellows, then the reds, the browns,
blues, blacks, and greens. But I have found this as I give it, to be best for use, simply because it keeps
the proper colors together, and the white, which you use most, where it is most easily got at, and I
think you will find it a good arrangement.
A Cheap Palette. - This palette I give so that you may see the range possible with absolutely
sound colors which are all of the least price. You can get no high key with it. All the colors are low in
tone. You could not paint the bright pitch of landscape with it, yet it is practically what they tried to
paint landscape with one hundred years ago, and it accounts largely for lack of bright greens in the
landscapes of that date. But for all sorts of indoor work and for portraits you will find it possible to
get most beautiful results. You will notice there is no bright yellow. That is because cadmium is
expensive and chrome is not permanent. Vermilion is left out for the same reason, Add orange
vermilion and cadmium yellow and orange cadmium, and you have a powerful palette of great range
and absolute permanency.
WHITE. NAPLES YELLOW.
VENETIAN RED. ROMAN OCHRE.
INDIAN RED. TRANSPARENT GOLD OCHRE.
BURNT SIENNA RAW UMBER.
PERMANENT BLUE. IVORY BLACK.
TERRE VERTE.