Testing Derivan Acrylic colours
Follow the process as I reorganised our palettes around the extended range of hues available in the Derivan Acrylic range.
The complete range of colours
This is the complete colour range of Derivan Acrylic Professional, arranged loosely around our colour wheel:
Basic Palette
From this great array of colours I've selected those that most closely align with our colour system. Our basic palette is on the bottom row, and the extended palette on the top row.
The next step was to make physical colour swatches corresponding to our basic palette of Red, Orange, Yellow Ochre, Warm Yellow, and Cool Blue. On the top row are the swatches we had used quite successfully up until now, made with Derivan Student Acrylic.
And here is the basic palette..
Top row: Derivan Student Acrylic.
Bottom row: Derivan Acrylic Professional.
| Inglis Academy: Basic Palette | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Inglis Academy name | Derivan Student name | Derivan Acrylic name | |||
| Red | Cool Red | Crimson | |||
| Orange | Orange | Vermilion | |||
| Yellow Ochre | Yellow Oxide | Yellow Oxide | |||
| Yellow | Yellow | Cadmium Yellow (hue) - see notes | |||
| Blue | Pthalo Blue | Pthalo Blue | |||
Our basic palette in Derivan Acrylic:
Our basic palette in Derivan Acrylic Professional, applied to the grey toned sketchbooks which are new to the course in 2020.
Yellow comparison
| Yellow family | ||
|---|---|---|
| Yellow Deep | Cad Yellow Hue | Lemon Yellow |
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| Derivan's colour swatches are much more accurate than mine, being produced under conditions of controlled light temperature and with professional cameras. Mine were done with flouro and ambient light, and using an iPhone. Smart phone software is oriented towards producing nice portraits and so warms up all the flesh colours. | ||
Based on this, we are going to now use Cad Yellow as our primary. Yellow Deep was closer to the Derivan Student Yellow we used as our primary prior to 2020, but Cadmium Yellow is more standard in the Chevreul / Quiller / Robinson / Inglis approach to colour mixing.
Using Cadmium Yellow as a primary also gives us the option of going to a warmer yellow (Yellow Deep) or a cooler yellow (Lemon Yellow) when needed. Once again the photograph is misleading, as the Lemon Yellow on the right is actually delicate, cool colour, not the ochre that my iphone interpreted it as!
While these pictures are a nice guide, they also demonstrate the limitations of cameras. The yellows in particular look much more vibrant in real life.
Extended Palette
Eventually I recreated all the colour swatches to show 3 common thicknesses we use in practice. Top to bottom:
- Impasto and textured
- Flat texture, thin with total coverage.
- Glazed. I merely added water to the paint. The swatches are white canvas, so that shows through.
My first swatches were thick, impasto and therefore totally opaque, creating some very very dark tones.