Colour Swatching suggested colours from my palette of colours
Daniel Smith’s Colours for Toulouse Urban Sketches
As part of the run-up the Urban Sketcher’s Symposium in Toulouse in July, Daniel Smith released their suggestions for depicting the iconic pink-city look and feel of Toulouse. Here’s the list they curated, and you can see examples of those colours in the article on their website:
- Potter’s Pink ST – a delicate rose pink, delicate with a neutral feel to it
- Piemontite Genuine (PrimaTek) ST – intense and velvety aubergine mass tone develops into an organic texture that looks almost like aged leather.
- English Red Earth O – a rich and warm earthy opaque colour that mixes well with cooler tones for shadows. It’s a soft, opaque brick pink with granulation.
- Italian Venetian Red O – a rich and bold colour that conveys historical character. It’s a vibrant, fiery, red earth, that leans towards a semi-transparent orange, with a soft granulation.
- Terre Ercolano ST – highly saturated natural and earthy brick red-orange, that is useful for depicting walls in the afternoon light.
- Coral Reef T – luminous warm pink with a contemporary and playful feel, it’s a light semi-transparent pink that hints of the Caribbean (pairs well with turquoise!)
All of these colours are granulating. Five are semi-transparent and one is opaque.
| Watercolor Color | Pigment Index Code | Granulation Status | Opacity Level |
|---|---|---|---|
| Potter’s Pink | Pr 233 | Highly Granulating | Semi-Trans |
| Terre Ercolano | PBr 7 & PR 101 | Granulating | Semi-Trans |
| Piemontite Genuine | Genuine Piemontite | Granulating | Semi-Trans |
| English Red Earth | PR 101 | Granulating | Opaque |
| Italian Venetian Red | PR 101 | Granulating | Semi-Trans |
| Coral Reef | PO 73, PW 6 | Non Granulating | Semi-Trans |
My 2026 Watercolour Palette
I set the colours in my watercolour palette at the beginning of the year, so I could use 2026 to explore my colour mixing skills. My goal was to use this limited set of colours based on input from Jane Blundell, and experiment with colour triads and explore colour harmony using a variety of analogous colour palettes. I did refine my palette a little, because I realised it wasn’t working for me, but since then, my palette has remained consistent.
From the Daniel Smith list, I only have Potter’s Pink in my palette.
Potter’s Pink in my Palette
I love Potter’s Pink for its intense granulation. I tend to use it mixed with other colours for building facades and pavements or roads – basically any big area that I want movement rather than a flat wash. But I also use it in skin tones in my people sketches. Wherever I use it, it adds an interesting level of texture, especially on rougher watercolour paper. It’s semi-transparent and doesn’t bully the colours you mix it with.
The other 5 Recommended Colours
I don’t have any of the other five suggested colours, and I don’t want to rush out and buy them just for this urban sketching adventure. To be honest, my style of painting relies more heavily on not representing every colour diligently.
I much prefer to capture the feeling or sense of a scene with my imaginary palette, rather than painting exactly what I see. This is why I’m drawn to using colour triads.
Toulouse has a distinct look and feel to it, and I do want to capture a sense of the place, without getting hung up on mirroring reality.
So instead of trying to replicate this exact colour palette from Daniel Smith, I want to see how to create similar colours using my existing palette of colours. This is a great opportunity to explore colour mixing with a distinct goal in mind. I’ll be using two of the colours I have in my palette that share the same pigment base, PR101, as those earthy colours in the Daniel Smith list.
Overview of the PR101 Pigment
Screen shot of colours from a PR101 pigment video on YouTube. A good resource if you want to explore all of these colours.
- PR101 Red – Synthetic Iron Oxide
- A fiery, deep orange-red made from synthetic iron oxide pigments also known as Mars pigments.
Of the two colours with PR101 as the base, one is highly transparent without granulation, and the other is granulating and opaque.
Burnt Sienna Light in my palette
I consider my current mix of colours to be incredibly versatile, but the biggest challenge is that all of these Daniel Smith colours on the list are granulating, and one of my key earth-tone colours: Burnt Sienna Light (PR101 and PO48)), is non-granulating. It’s also highly transparent (which is why I have it as my burnt sienna option). So to replicate the granulation, I’ll have to mix it with some Potter’s Pink to force texture into the mixture.
Indian Red in my palette
Another colour I can leverage from my palette is Indian Red (PR101). It’s an intense dense red that I use a lot for roof tiles here in Portugal. You have to use it sparingly, because it’s a bit of an opaque palette bully. As soon as you add it to other colours, it dominates the colour you’ve created.
When using it for roof tiles, I tend to dilute it for the initial layers to reduce its opacity, and then mix it with other colours for the subsequent layers for the darker tones. If you use Indian red in its full strength, it creates dead areas in your sketch rather than areas of transparency and light.
Using Opaque Colours from my Palette
The same happens with Cobalt Turquoise Light and Buff Titanium, both of these are in my palette and have a dense opaque colour. When you love specific shades, it’s easy to overlook your desire for a palette full of transparent colours. Part of the journey of adding opaque colours to your palette, is learning how to use them sparingly, so they have maximum impact without overwhelming your sketch.
Creating the Toulouse-specific colours from my existing palette of colours
I had an afternoon of playing around with paint swatches, and here’s the lessons I learned:
Burnt Sienna Light vs Indian Red as a Base
My Burnt Sienna Light and Indian Red both have the same pigment base as most of the suggested colours, so as long as I start with one of these, I’ll be able to get a close approximation to these earthy terra cotta colours.
If you want to use the Burnt Sienna Light as the base, I’m going to have to add Potter’s Pink to add the required granulation. Another option is to use a mix of Indian Red and Burnt Sienna Light to reduce the overall opacity of the mix.
Potter’s Pink is an essential colour for adding granulation, but also for toning down the vibrancy of the colours.
Warming Up or Cooling Down a Colour
Depending on the mix, when I needed to warm a colour mix up, I used a little bit of Quin Rose or Pyrrol Scarlet, depending on whether a cool or warm red was needed.
To cool a colour down, a dash of French Ultramarine. It adds a little extra granulation, and a coolness without making the colours cold.
Opera Pink as a Base
Coral Pink is the outlier in the group of colours. I used Opera Pink as the base for Coral Reef – even though they have different pigments. Then I desaturated it with Potter’s Pink, and added a warm yellow (either Hansa Yellow Medium or New Gamboge) to push the colour towards a peachy-orange.
Coral Reef is a playful colour, and maybe buildings will never look like this naturally in Toulouse, unless of course the mid-day sun is shining brightly on them. But if you want to push the pinkness of the city for more playful sketches, and don’t want to revert to the vivid Opera Pink, this Coral Pink is a good alternative.
This pink would look fabulous with Cobalt Turquoise Light, and so I’m thinking of playing with a colour triad of Opera Pink, Cobalt Turquoise Light, and Hansa Yellow Medium. This combination would create a really abstract looking street scene full of bright and vibrant primary, secondary, and tertiary colour combinations for some urban sketches during the USk Symposium in Toulouse.
I’ll show the results in a subsequent post.
