I love painting portraits. I try to paint at least a little one every day. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about skin tones, values, chroma, and how different pigments behave in mixes. Yet this little six-color portrait set had me wondering whether I actually knew what I was doing.
In the end, I painted five portraits with it. And I kept running into the same problems with each one. At one point, I started to think that maybe I was the problem! But, after analyzing everything at the end of this journey, I don’t think that that’s the case.
So, today I want to talk about this very unusual Daniel Smith portrait set, why it gave me so much trouble, and what all of that frustration taught me about the cool side of a portrait palette.
What Is This Set All About?
I actually came across this set fairly recently on Blick’s website while researching for my upcoming Watercolor News Report, and initially I assumed it was new because I’d never heard of it. But it isn’t – it’s been around since 2021. Yet I could find almost no videos exploring this palette. The artist who curated the set, Lesya Poplavskaya, has an excellent demonstration on their channel, but beyond that, there really isn’t much discussion about it.
Which is strange, because it is a very eye-catching palette. It contains six colors:
- Nickel Azo Yellow PY150
- Quinacridone Burnt Orange PO48
- Organic Vermilion PR188
- Rhodonite Genuine
- Mayan Blue Genuine – both of these are Primatek paints
- And Perylene Green PBk31
There are no traditional earth pigments like Yellow Ochre, Burnt Sienna, or Burnt Umber. There is also no conventional blue like Ultramarine, Cobalt, or Phthalo Blue. Instead, you have a warm yellow, an earthy orange, a warm red, a cool granulating pink-violet, a muted granulating blue-green, and an extremely dark-valued green-black. And when I first swatched these colors, I thought: this is weird for portraits – but it might be secretly brilliant.
What Paints Are In This Set?
All six paints are transparent. Five are staining. Four have high tinting strength. Three granulate. And the palette has some excellent complementary relationships. Perylene Green and Organic Vermilion make a gorgeous inky black, but you can also obtain some gorgeous textural greys with Mayan Blue Genuine and Organic Vermilion, and Perylene Green and Rhodonite Genuine.
The warm half of this palette is remarkably solid, spanning an excellent transparent warm yellow, to a vibrant yet earthy orange, to a high-chroma red-orange, to a clear red-violet. These allow you to mix golden, peachy, and cool pink skin tones. A portrait palette has to first prove that it can actually mix a variety of diverse skin hues and values, and so that’s the first thing I checked. On a swatch chart, the palette appears to have an excellent range. But these mixes turned out to be slightly misleading, and that’s because being able to theoretically mix a color, is very different from actually being able to span the range of hue, value, and chroma needed to be able to paint portraits. This was the lesson I was about to learn the hard way.
First Wash: No Problems
The first wash in every portrait actually started really well. As I said, this set is really well-balanced on the warm side, and because I usually start out with high-chroma light values, just mixing along the warm side, without introducing any cool paints, worked out very well. I was always able to get the glowing hues I wanted. But with the second wash, I need darker values. This is where everything fell apart.
Second Wash: Dark Values Become a Problem
To be clear, I could mix brown, even dark brown. I proved that to myself with my mixing chart. The problem was building darker values while still preserving chroma and luminosity in the mixes. Because my subject’s skin isn’t orange-brown and darker gray-brown. The dark valued areas still contain rich saturated color, from olive tones to chocolate browns to dark-valued red-violets. But, I realized that although this palette moves very well through light values, it has surprisingly limited ways to move through dark values. This is because both Perylene Green and Mayan Blue Genuine sit right across from orange-red on the color wheel, and so they move right through the middle of the color wheel and make neutrals that are gorgeous but very low-chroma and “gray” and frankly quite muddy.
This was especially true if I leaned on Mayan Blue Genuine – it neutralizes vibrant orange, red, and pink skin tones to a grayish color. It is also quite granulating, and it separates in mixes and so the dark values really fall apart. But even if I use the darker-valued Perylene Green, it neutralizes skin tones and renders skin tones grayish as well. I can see how these mixes are useful for hair, backgrounds, and clothing. But for skin tones, I want dark-valued and high-chroma and still warm. And this palette kept giving me dark-valued, desaturated, and gray. I needed a dependable cool pigment to accurately modify reds and orange and to build shadows while preserving chroma, and neither of the cool paints could do it.
I Tried Again Four Times
And so I tried again four more times, really concentrating on not overmixing on the palette, and really concentrating on mixing on the warm side of the palette as much as possible, and only relying on the cools when I really needed them for big value changes. But it was always the same thing: beautiful beginning with warm, luminous washes, and then grayish darker values. It was a frustrating process, and I felt like I was fighting the palette the entire time.
What If I Painted Only Light-Valued Skin Tones?
At this point, I decided to change one variable – I chose a subject with light-valued skin. I laid down the first wash with a mix of Nickel Azo Yellow and Rhodonite Genuine, again focusing on mixing on paper rather than on the palette. After the first wash dried, I used Quinacridone Burnt Orange and Rhodonite Genuine, creating values about 40% darker than the first wash, to paint the shadows.
This portrait went much better, and I achieved light-valued luminous peachy and rosy hues. I had a lot of fun using those same desaturated mixes that had frustrated me so much in skin, to paint the hair. But I paint people that see around me, with all variety of skin hues and values. And not being able to do that with a portrait palette is a deal-breaker for me.
Mixing Range vs Painting Range
This palette illustrates the following observation really well: there is a difference between what I would call a palette’s mixing range and its practical painting range. A palette can theoretically be capable of mixing a color. But if that mix doesn’t work well with your subject, and in relation to the other paints in the palette, then that theoretical mixing range is much less useful. I think that’s exactly the case for this set.
What Makes A Good Portrait Set?
Before this experiment, when I thought about what makes a good portrait palette, I tended to focus on individual paint properties: are the paints transparent? Are they staining? Can they mix a wide hue and value range?
I still think all of those things matter a lot. But I now see that a good portrait palette needs to do more than just be able to mix a dark value. It needs useful ways to get to that point without unwanted changes in hue and chroma. The cools in this palette certainly neutralize skin tones – but always at the cost of losing vibrancy and saturation. And in a portrait, especially when painting darker skin tones, that contain rich reds, oranges, violets, and olives, that is just not a price that I want to pay, especially with so many better options available.
Who Is This Palette For?
After five portraits, I can safely say that I would not recommend this as a beginner portrait palette. It’s a specific palette with a particular personality. You have to have a good portrait foundation already, so that you can know what to do with the granulation, separation, and desaturation inherent to this set. If you enjoy expressive or abstract portraits, these properties may be exactly what makes this palette perfect for you. But at least at my level, this set is not for me.
Strangely, despite all my frustration with this set, I’m glad I did this deep dive. I thought I was going to review an obscure portrait palette, but instead it kicked off a much longer and enjoyable investigation into portrait palette design, especially when it comes to the cool paints in a palette. The warm colors establish the local hue of the skin, but the right cool colors allow you to build form with colorful and dark-valued shadows. So, you can see that this set actually made me understand portrait palettes much better than ever. And I think that is probably worth five paintings.
Thanks for joining me for today’s deep dive. Stay curious, and happy painting!