My Palette as of October 2025

A couple of months ago I worked with Jane Blundell to refine my watercolor palette in preparation for the Urban Sketching Symposium in Toulouse. I had two goals. I wanted to make sure:

• I was comfortable with the selection of colours in my palette, and
• I built up a wealth of colour mixing knowledge using this limited set of watercolours.

It’s so easy to keep buying new watercolour hues, but so many of the available colours can be easily and effectively mixed from just two or three already in your palette. My plan is to (really) finalise my palette by the end of the year, and then work with only those colours in the studio and on my urban sketching days out.

Urban Sketcher’s Palettes

I’m really interested in seeing the colour palettes being used by other urban sketches. But unless you live in the same geographic location and paint similar subjects there’s no point just copying somebody else’s pallet exactly. Granted, it’s a good starting point, but then you need to spend a few months refining the palette to make sure it works for you in your specific situation.

Exploring Watercolour Palettes from other Urban Sketchers

Here’s some colour palette inspiration from well-known urban sketchers:

• Liz Steel current urban sketching palette 2024 and her small palette of colours
• 12 watercolour palette suggestions from Jane Blundell
• Felix Scheinberger has a distinctive set of colours he always uses.
• Paul Wang 2024 urban sketching palette
• Shari Blaukopt watercolour palette course

Deciding on an Urban Sketching Palette

My first decision was to decide how many colours I wanted to have in my urban sketching kit. My selection needed to be versatile enough that I had all of the colours I needed to paint any of the urban sketching scenes I encountered, but it also had to be mobile enough to be lugged around all day.

My Current SMALL Urban Sketching Palette

I’ve got a varied selection of palettes (as every artist knows, there’s something very collectable about them!) The smallest palette I have is my 6 pan Portable Painter micro palette. It has a water container and a multiple mixing areas, and folds away to 5cm x 7cm. It’s ideal for popping in a small bag.

It’s great for taking away on short breaks, and is filled with the Essential Set of Daniel Smith cool and warm primary colours.

I can mix a good range of secondary and tertiary colours with this set of 6 watercolours, both saturated and desaturated.

But a broader range of colours is needed for day’s out urban sketching. Especially when you don’t know what subjects you’ll encounter.

My Current LARGE Urban Sketching Palette

Rather than buying a new palette, I decided to make one of my existing palettes work, and chose this 20-pan palette.

I worked with Jane Blundell, who is a well-known colour mixing aficionado. She even has her own Daniel Smith dot card and 15 half-pan ultimate mixing palette set, and her “Jane’s Grey” is available in the Daniel Smith watercolour range. Her goal with her mixing set is to find single pigment colours that could be used to mix most colours from two single pigments (or at the most, a third pigment) to create any hue you need. This way you don’t end up with mixed colours that look like mud!

Jane started off by looking at my current palette and making recommendations for which colours to omit because they can be easily mixed from other hues, and she also shared insights on which colours are versatile mixing colours. She also took into account which colours I considered “essential”. These are one’s I use a lot, so it makes sense to have them readily available in my palette rather than having to mix them every time I need them.

In my next blog post, I’ll share the colours I had in my palette, and where I ended up after working with Jane.