Again I squeezed out the colors I used for my Richard Schmid Color Charts: Cadmium Lemon, Cadmium Yellow, Yellow Ochre, Cadmium Red Light, Terra Rosa, Alizarin Crimson, Burnt Sienna, Viridian, Manganese Blue and French Ultramarine Blue.

En Plain Air landscape, oil painting, 14" x 14" on board 'Backyard Hedgerow'

After the fact, I realized I never dipped into the Cadmium Yellow,Cadmium Red Light or the Burnt Sienna.  My greens are all variations of mixing Cadmium Lemon, Viridian and White.  The light, cool green is just Viridian with White.  Violets are mixes of Viridian and Alizarin Crimson.  The Grays are mixes of Terra Rosa with either Viridian, Manganese Blue or French Ultramarine Blue plus White.  All of my mixes consisted of no more than two colors, not counting white.

The color scheme turns out to be a modified triad, greens on the cool side, violets on the warm side and blues.  My focus was on mixing the values carefully.

By using a large palette I was able to judge my mixes against each other as I mixed them.  I found that I threw out all of the mixes in which I used Cadmium Yellow, Cadmium Red Light or Burnt Sienna.  Those are great colors, but they didn’t work with this painting.  Browns, reds and super warm greens stuck out like a sore thumb on the palette.  Fortunately I didn’t apply any to the painting.