Lemon Yellow + Quin Magenta + Cerulean Blue Chromium (Limited Palette)

Here are the colour swatches I have created for another limited paletted video that I've posted on Youtube (below).

The colours I've chosen this time are Lemon Yellow (PY175), Quinacridone Magenta (PR202) and Cerulean Blue Chromium (PB36). These are the three main colours in my current palette of mostly Daniel Smith watercolours.

Lemon Yellow is the brightest, most vibrant and cleanest yellow I've ever seen.

Quinacridone Magenta is a strong and vibrant magenta. Quinacridone is used for industrial paints and is hence very lightfast and permanent. I'm not particularly fond of Quinacridone magenta though, maybe because I'm not fond of cool reds. But Quinacridone Magenta is a good colour with high tinting strength. I've a tube from two years ago and I've only used half of it because you only need a tiny bit of colour to create really intense washes.

Cerulean Blue Chromium is a really beautiful granulating blue that I think most people will love when they see it. It's lovely. Tinting strength of Cerulean Blue Chromium is medium. I tend to use a lot of this colour when mixing, and I can go through a tube rather fast.

Here's a close up of the colour wheel I've created.

The limitation of this limited palette would be its inability to produce bright oranges because of the cool yellow and cool red. So to complement this set, it may be good to add a warm yellow and warm red.

With Lemon Yellow and Cerulean Blue Chromium, you can get a sunny granulating yellow green. It's a warm green so it won't be easy to mix those dark blue shadows underneath huge trees.

These are the grey tones you can get by mixing the three colours together. It's difficult to get the perfect neutral tone.

Another colour that's good to add to this limited palette is Burnt Sienna which will produce a lovely grey with Cerulean Blue Chromium. It's also much faster to mix a grey this way.

Here's the sketch I coloured with this limited palette.

The shadows are mixed with Quinacridone Magenta and Cerulean Blue Chromium. The resulting mixture is a granulating purple where you can still see the individual colours that were used to create the mix. It's a visually interesting shadow. And it works really well when glazed over the yellow walls.

The grass on the ground was mixed with Lemon Yellow and Cerulean Blue Chromium. It's bright and clean look. The foliage in the background is muted green created with the same mixture but with a bit of Quinacridone Magenta added. The difference in the two greens helps separates the foreground against the background.

Cerulean Blue Chromium is a colour I use often for painting skies. You can use it straight from the tube for the cheery sky blue. Add a bit of Burnt Sienna and dark clouds will form.

Another downside of this limited palette is that it's challenging to mix black. Cerulean Blue doesn't have the covering strength compared to Phthalo Blue and even French Ultramarine. So a lot of paint is needed to create black, and sometimes that paint becomes too thick which is difficult to apply on paper.