Note 238 — LETTER III.
Reading edition
It is, I think, a piece of affectation to try to work with few colours; it saves time to have enough tints prepared without mixing, and you may at once allow yourself these twenty-four. If you arrange them in your colour-box in the order I have set them down, you will always easily put your finger on the one you want.
Cobalt.Smalt.Antwerp blue.Prussian blue.
Black.Gamboge.Emerald green.Hooker's green.
Lemon yellow.Cadmium yellow.Yellow ochre.Roman ochre.
Raw sienna.Burnt sienna.Light red.Indian red.
Mars orange.Ext't of vermilion.Carmine.Violet carmine.
Brown madder.Burnt umber.Vandyke brown.Sepia.
Antwerp blue and Prussian blue are not very permanent colours, but you need not care much about permanence in your own work as yet, and they are both beautiful; while Indigo is marked by Field as more fugitive still, and is very ugly. Hooker's green is a mixed colour, put in the box merely to save you loss of time in mixing gamboge and Prussian blue. No. 1. is the best tint of it. Violet carmine is a noble colour for laying broken shadows with, to be worked into afterwards with other colours.
If you wish to take up colouring seriously, you had better get Field's "Chromatography" at once; only do not attend to anything it says about principles or harmonies of colour; but only to its statements of practical serviceableness in pigments, and of their operations on each other when mixed, &c.