Vintage Watercolor Floral Color Palette
Jan 14, 2023
Vintage Watercolor Floral Color Palette
When I painted these loose cottage florals, I wanted to create a color palette that evoked vintage vibes, warmth, and freshness. Verbascum flowers have towering spikes and come in a variety of beautiful colors like peach, salmon, yellow, and dusty pink. The centers are darker, and the green stems and foliage add texture. I thought they would make a great flower to paint with the contrast in the dark centers. Scroll down to see how I mixed the colors.
I planned to paint a cluster of these blooms in varying shades of salmon, peachy yellow and dusty rose. Although I tend to use a more limited palette, with this particular painting, I used many colors! I had to mix several of them together in order to achieve the colors I desired.
The main colors I used throughout were Juane (by holbein) which is a nice peachy color. It's very light and has some white in the pigment so it leans a bit chalky. It was a color I used throughout most of the flowers to unify them. To make it lean more coral, I darkened it with rose madder and added some winsor red and touches of winsor yellow. I just adjusted the amount of each color to make each stalk either more pink or more yellow. For the darker centers of the blooms, I dropped in a very saturated mixture of rose madder and burnt sienna.
For the darker dusty rose colored blooms I used a mixture of rose madder, a tiny amount of juane, and some burnt sienna, and even a bit of winsor red. The burnt sienna made it look less pink and more of a dusty rose color. While the paint was wet, I dropped in a very dark saturated mixture rose madder and a bit of violet into the centers of the flowers.
For the green foliage, I wanted to keep it somewhat of a fresh spring green. I used sap green and yellow ochre. To darken it I used perylene green, and touches of winsor blue.
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