Quick Sketches to Explore my Colour Triad

Indian Red in my Palette

Recently I’ve been playing around with my Indian Red because Daniel Smith recommended a variety of PR101 pigments for the Urban Sketcher’s Symposium in Toulouse. I don’t have any of the specific pigments that Daniel Smith recommended so I experimented with creating my own using the two colours in my palette with the same pigment number: the opaque Indian Red, and the transparent Burnt Sienna Light.

Indian Red is so dense that I rarely use it at full-strength, but it does create some nice dusty pinky rose colours when diluted, and will be ideal for sketching Toulouse. I usually use it for roof tiles here in the Algarve. It’s the cuckoo in my watercolour palette where I favour transparent and semi-transparent colours.

Indian Red in a Colour Triad

I created this colour wheel using Indian Red, Manganese Blue Hue, and Buff Titanium. It seems like a good all-round triad to use for Toulouse street scenes, because it has brick reds and oranges for buildings, blue for the sky, and a pale green for foliage. There’s also a good range of dark blues and grey for shadows and depth.

But I wanted to see if this would be a useful triad to play with in Toulouse, so I did a couple of quick sketches on a piece of scrap paper to see what this colour triad looked like, and I really liked it. It has a great mix of warm and cool colours, and the brightness of the blue really helps to offset the denseness of the opaque colour mixes.

I dug out some photos from my trip to Toulouse in 2020 and did sketches of some of the interesting bits of architecture. I don’t have the patience to sketch huge intricate buildings, which takes hours to sketch and paint. I’d much rather capture smaller elements from a scene in a loose sketch and watercolour style, so that I can complete them quickly and move on. I sketched these with a continuous line and used the colours from this triad to bring the sketch to life.

I think this colour triad is going to be really versatile in Toulouse. I’m going to be able to focus on line and shadows, and not get distracted (or overwhelmed) by too much colour and detail. I intend to go for volume and speed, over a studied and slow sketching style. This is my approach for sketching people (mainly because they move about so much!) – but I don’t see why I can’t use the same quick approach for sketching static objects like buildings, statues, and street scenes.

Another Triad for Toulouse

Here’s another Triad I was exploring for Toulouse, which uses the same blue, but the Burnt Sienna Light in places of the Indian Red. Instead of the neutral Buff Titanium, this triad uses Quin Gold, which creates a lot of warmer oranges and yellow, and a desaturated range of greens.