Hints, Tips & Techniques for Designers' Gouache - Colours

Recommended Colour Palette

Basic palette

Your initial palette should provide a wide colour spectrum and should have a good balance between strong tinting and weaker tinting colours. The common practice is to maintain a broad palette of about twelve colours and add to it for specific requirements. We recommend the following as a basic colour palette.

Lemon Yellow, Permanent Yellow Deep, Flame Red, Cadmium Red, Alizarin Crimson, Phthalo Blue, Ultramarine, Winsor Green, Burnt Umber, Yellow Ochre, Burnt Sienna, Permanent White.

There are a selection of whites, blacks & metallics available depending on your needs:

The Whites

• Permanent White is the most popular white in the range. It is the strongest and most opaque white. Permanent White has been modified so that it can now be used for mixing.

• Zinc White has a lower tinting strength and is therefore sometimes preferred for colour mixing.

• Bleedproof White is used by designers to prevent underlayers from bleeding through. This is a temporary solution and is not appropriate for fine art use as bleeding will occur eventually. (These are only available in 30ml pots).

• Process White is designed for use in photographic retouching, where it will reproduce its true value. (These are only available in 30ml pots).

The Blacks 

• Ivory Black is less opaque with lower tinting strength and makes brown (warm) greys and sepia tones when mixed with white.

• Jet Black is a rich, deep, opaque black which makes blue greys when mixed with white. 

• Lamp Black is a less opaque black of lower tinting strength, giving paler, blue (cool) greys when mixed with white.

Metallics

Gold and Silver are available in 14ml tubes and 30ml pots within the Designers' Gouache range, however teh formulations differ slightly. The gold and silver formulations used in the pots are metallic based, whereas the tube formulations use mica based pigments which have a metallic sheen but contain no metal. The pot colour is a little more fluid and generally stronger and more opaque. The tube colours will not tarnish. 

Photographic Opaque

Photographic Opaque is used on negatives for spotting pinholes or to block out backgrounds, so that when the negative is processed these will not appear in the final photograph. (These are only available in 60ml pots).