A note before we begin to delve into color for the next five weeks: Don’t pay too much attention to color names as they aren’t always consistent across the paint companies. Instead you want to focus on finding the pigment color number, which I will always include when naming a hue.

A neutral yellow anchors all of my palettes, field and studio. In some fashion it always finds its way into my mixes to gently push a hue simultaneously brighter and warmer. Used alone as a glaze, yellow can make everything sun-kissed or push down the chroma of the complementary hues (its opposites) in the layers underneath.

There is an incredible variety of yellow pigments available to us today. This hue was a favorite of JMW Turner, who used it to make his skies glow. Vincent Van Gogh adored it and used it during his time in Arles (1888–1889) to represent light, hope, and warmth.

I’ve tried many yellows as a primary hue for the Munsell palette and kept coming back to Hansa Yellow Medium PY97. It’s a clear, neutral yellow that behaves beautifully in mixes as well as on its own. It is high chroma, transparent (a key trait of my Munsell primary palette), and can be altered easily to the cool or warm side of the hue. It mixes with violet to create incredibly warm browns that are useful when painting a lion’s mane or the form shadows of a lemon. As we begin to build our palette with colors over the following weeks, we will start to mix with this hue.

View this week’s video demo to see a brief demonstration of altering Hansa Yellow Medium PY97 to create Lemon Yellow and New Gamboge equivalents and learn why you want to be in control of the temperature and chroma of yellow.

Next week: Green!

Part 2 of an ongoing Tuesday series a about the materials and tools used for nature journaling and in my own studio practice. You can find part 1 here: