I think it is personal preference. I paint with acrylics and I use a rectangular palette. Down the left hand, long side, top to bottom, I put cadmium yellow light or benzi yellow, Indian yellow, cadmium orange, cadmium red light, sometimes pyrolle red, and quinacridone magenta. Up the right side I put dioxazine purple, ultramarine blue, pthalo blue green shade, and pthalo green yellow shade. And across the top, left to right, I put yellow ochre, burnt sienna or burnt umber, red oxide, raw umber, black and white.

I used to order my Watercolor palette from the Yellows, Reds to the Blues, Violets and Black/Dark Grays ,then around the corner to the dark Brown Earths and back to the light Yellow Earths to the Greens. It was predictable, but not very coherent. I use a compartmented Mijello-type palette to store my untubed ready-paints, and a separate tray for my mixing, …often a disposable paper plate. This year’s painting sesson I may make a change.

Since many landscapes and marinescapes fail from too much chroma, this year I’m thinking of exploring near-monochromatic oil painting for a change. Concentrate on “values”, rather than “color” and value is easier to control with oils compared to watercolors. White, Burnt Sienna, Phthalo Blue or Ivory Black, maybe Yellow Ochre …and several premixed tubed neutral Munsell Grays. I’m intrigued by Jerry’s Twelve Shades of Gray[/em] oil set for just a hint of low chroma color for accents.

I’m struggling with the same question. I just bought a new palette and I’m trying to decide how to arrange it. I’ve been painting about 18 months and have tried a wide variety of palettes and techniques, none that really worked for me. My first palette (which I went back to recently), I did arrange all the colors in a dark to light fashion. But the other thing I’m trying to do is use less colors, I’d love to limit myself to say 10…..7 or 8 would even be better. As Ted stated, values are really whats important and it’s easy for a beginner to get carried away by “color”.

One thought I had was to use a separate well area for my opaques (e.g. cadmiums, cerulean blue, etc.), one for infrequently used colors, and a “main area” for the heavy hitters (in my case, Ultramarine Blue, Cobalt Blue, Burnt Sienna, Yellow Ochre and a couple others I use in nearly every painting). Really not sure if that’s the “right” way but I don’t have any better ideas.

I paint in oils now, primarily, but I did have some degree of success when I worked with watercolors.

One thing I recall quite vividly was that once I placed “New Gamboge”, or “Gamboge Nova” on my palette, it nearly obsoleted all of my other, previous “Yellows”, most of which were opaque colors.

With Gamboge Nova, and Indigo on my palette, I discovered that I could pretty much paint whatever I wanted, with a few added colors.

Gamboge (Yellow) mixes with all sorts of other colors to create Greens, Oranges, and Reds. Indigo rather serves as an “off-Black” adding darker values, without interfering with hues very much.

These are two really excellent, and useful colors that I would not want to be without if I were to take up watercolor painting again.:thumbsup:

I’m right-handed, so I put my palette on the right side of my workspace. I started with the typical arrangement like you’ve shown in post #7. But the lighter colors on the left end of the palette were frequently contaminated by my accidental drips when coming from the darker colors on the right side of the palette.

Example: I’d scoop up some burnt umber from the right end of the palette, and then while bringing my brush back to the paper, I’d accidentally drop a nasty blob of burnt umber into my “clean” yellow on the palette.

So eventually I reversed the order, with yellow on the right end of the palette and burnt umber on the left end. This works for me.

That makes rather good sense, to me.:)

Have a look over in The Learning Zone, under the Watercolor section of the site. Loads of great info on which pigments, and people’s preferred order.

Some thoughts:
-some folk fill two spaces each with their yellows (so 2 warm & 2 cool) so they can use one well for dipping/mixing yet keep the second one clean for pure pigment.
-some folk have seperate palettes for granulating paints, toxic paints (like cadmiums) or for more opaque pigments (to keep the others truly transparent).
-it’s a good idea at the beginning, when you’re relearning which pigments you like or don’t like, to fill pans with your tube paint and move them around your palette spaces (with poster putty or magnets on metal to ‘stick’ them down). It makes your palette more flexible until you get it ‘settled’.
-one buying suggestion, if you like landscapes. Perylene Green. Very dark in masstone and very handy for shadow side of foliage.
-check out Jane Blundell’s watercolour mixing resources (site & blog). She suggests a mixing set of 12 pigments that is a great idea.

Welcome back to watercolour!