When I approach the finish of a painting, I often vacillate between adding a spot of new color or not, or maybe adding a different color. One of my signatures on abstract paintings is a small square or a thin line of a bright new color at the sweet spot.

This week I’ve been working with a new palette. The colors are Liquitex Muted Violet, Liquitex Twilight, Liquitex Raspberry, and Liquitex Naples Yellow, and I’ve reached the place on “All Squared Up” where I need to decide. So far, I haven’t used yellow at all, except possibly a tad mixed with the Raspberry. So I’ve painted small pieces of paper with Naples Yellow and attached them with tape.

Usually, I leave the paper in place for a while and move on to other canvases, but today I decided to photograph it both ways. Seeing it on the screen offers a new perspective. Here’s how they look with and without:

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I’m still vacillating. What do you think?

Meanwhile, here are the other two canvases from this palette, still in progress:

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In the past, I’ve worked primarily with either warm or cool versions of the classics, red, blue and yellow. Technically, that’s still true, but switching to muted premixed colors has opened my range. While most muted versions can be obtained by adding gray to the primary, and I’ve done that in the past, I never would have considered an entire palette based on muted green or muted violet if I hadn’t seen the colors on the shelf and found them yummy.

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