My mentor told me to stop using pre-made color palettes back in March

I argued with him for weeks about it. I said it saved time and looked professional. But last month I spent 8 hours painting a mural for a local coffee shop in Austin and realized every pre-set combo I tried felt flat. I finally mixed my own greens and oranges from scratch and the client actually noticed the difference. Has anyone else had a teacher give them advice that felt wrong at first but turned out to be spot on?

2 comments

2 Comments

sam_harris689d ago

yeah but you gotta be careful not to swing too hard the other way and end up mixing mud for every little job. there's a middle ground where you use a pre-made palette as a rough starting point and then tweak it yourself instead of throwing it out entirely. i learned that the hard way when i spent a whole afternoon trying to match a specific teal from scratch only to realize i could have just started with a store bought base.

michael_wood329d ago

@sam_harris68 you're basically describing my entire painting career in two sentences. spent three hours once trying to get a dusty rose from scratch and ended up with something that looked like dirty bandaids. finally just bought a tube of muted pink and added a drop of gray. done in thirty seconds. the pride of mixing your own colors wears off real quick when you're staring at a wall of muddy failure at 10pm. now i keep a few solid bases around and just adjust from there. feels like cheating but my walls look better for it.