Water-Soluble Oils - My personal Color wheel


This afternoon I painted a whole color wheel with my water soluble oils, Cobra brand.  I used a quick drying medium gloss gel, Duo Aqua Oil. I was able to paint on the paper easily enough and the paint already seems almost dry to the touch. The result at this stage is fairly matte.  I will see how applying a gloss glaze on top once dry works.   I worked on this for around 5 hours. Here are photographs:

Color Wheels with my Water Soluble Oils

Color Wheel Front (WMO)

Color Wheel Back (WMO)



I decided to use the colors I intend to take with me to hawaii, pretty much matching my usual palette: cadmium yellow medium, indian yellow,  cadmium red light,  carmine (to replace alizarin crimson, not available for Cobra), cobalt violet, ultramarine blue, cobalt blue, phthalo blue (or cerulean blue since phthalo blue can be so overpowering), phthalo green (to replace viridian) and titanium white.  Perhaps I will have as convenience colors, cadmium orange and primary yellow, a cool yellow, almost cad lemon. as well as yellow ochre, since I am so familiar with it. I mix my 'black' from the cad red light and ultramarine blue.  The cad red light is similar to the cadmium orange of Utrecht and this mixture results in a fairly good grey.  I made a warm dark by adding a little more red and some cad yellow light.  Then I made grays from these two darks to be used for the tones on the wheel. (For this wheel, I also mixed all the colors with the quick drying gel I mentioned above).

Will I find this useful when painting outside?  I am not sure (see the discussion below with the additional personal wheel image).  I feel as if separate charts of mixtures for the ocean, sky and mountains would be more useful.

To speed up the process for me right now, and since I am comfortable with my own palette, I will probably first do a normal rectangular chart of the closest colors to my usual palette I don't know if I want to experiment with a very limited palette only to find that I need more colors in Hawaii.  I think there's only one good art supply store, not particularly convenient. So I do intend to carry the convenience colors as well.  I might prepare a couple of tubes of the darks.

But I have to consider ocean colors: do I have the right tube colors for the ocean?  In the past, prussian blue has been recommended.  This is similar to Phthalo Blue or perhaps cerulean. Which of these three should I use (along with ultramarine blue)?  So I will do a water colors' color chart or study paintings for the best color.  As I mentioned elsewhere a good study of other artists' ocean paintings would be helpful, and since I know both Don's and Doug's palettes I will assume these.  I know that Doug has added phthalo blue AND cobalt violet to his newer, more colorful palette so I will probably include them (I have the holbein WMO cobalt violet).  Don uses a more limited version of Doug's palette.

And then the best green's and violets for the mountains: needs another chart.

Note that the personal wheel has more gradations in the tints, tones and shades. However, I can see that i didn't get enough variation in the 'neutral' blues and violets to be of much help. These are important colors for landscapes, so I will have to see how I can adjust these, perhaps changing my base 'primary' colors.  

Additional personal wb color wheel image
Full personal wb wheel

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