Reference room
Learn
Pigment families and working mixtures, set into plates you can read, pour, and carry to the bench.
Oil
Slow-drying, opaque, forgiving. The chapters below mix on a Winsor & Newton oil basis.
Folio 01
Useful Neutrals
Neutrals do the quiet work of every painting. A canvas is mostly them: the grays, the near-blacks, the drab in-betweens that let the loud color speak.
7 plates · Open the chapter
Folio 02
Earth Colors
Earths are the oldest paints there are, dug from the ground and reliable as gravity. They are cheap, permanent, fast-drying, and incapable of gaudiness, which is why every palette that has to work for a living carries them.
6 plates · Open the chapter
Folio 03
Complementary Mixtures
Opposites on the wheel do not make mud; they make the most trustworthy neutrals in painting, and choosing which opposites decides everything. A strong pair kills fast and hard.
6 plates · Open the chapter
Folio 04
The Green Problem
No color defeats more landscape painters than green. Nature serves it in ten thousand variations and the tube serves it in three, all wrong: too minty, too loud, too much from nowhere.
5 plates · Open the chapter
Acrylic
Fast, permanent, and honest only once it dries. Mixed on a Golden basis.
Folio 05
The Drying Clock
Acrylic tells one lie, and it tells it every single time: the color on your palette is not the color on your wall. The binder is milky while it is wet and clarifies as it cures, so every passage dries a step darker and a touch quieter than the mix you approved.
6 plates · Open the chapter
Folio 06
The Clean Pair
The Complementary Mixtures folio taught you to kill chroma on purpose. This one teaches the opposite skill: keeping it alive.
6 plates · Open the chapter
Watercolor
Transparent washes over white paper. Mixed on a Daniel Smith basis.
Folio 07
The Water Itself
Watercolor owns one idea completely: the white is the paper, and the water is how you spend it. Every other medium lightens by adding paint; this one lightens by adding restraint.
7 plates · Open the chapter
Folio 08
The Traveling Triad
Every plein air painter eventually discovers the same secret: three tubes are enough. A rose, a yellow, and a blue, chosen well, will mix most of a landscape and every color they make will belong to the same family, which is why paintings from one triad hold together the way bigger palettes never quite do.
6 plates · Open the chapter