Painting with Triads

In December 2025 while following my continuous quest for the perfect limited palette, I joined a few Discord colleagues to choose and paint from a random triad each day throughout the period of the year known as Advent. We called it Triadvent. I figured it would enable (aka force) me to use some of the lonely untouched paints in my supply and contribute to a more structured and consistent sketching routine. I came to a surprising (to me) realization: removing color choice as a necessary step before painting allows me to focus on other aspects of my craft. As some may simply say, “Duh!” After all, getting to know materials through triads and limited palettes is something I’ve heard recommended over and over from seasoned artists. But, I always thought I had to first find the “perfect” limited palette before beginning to dig deeply into using the colors. I’ve now come to realize that the colors themselves are not as important as the learning that comes from actually putting them to use. And, there is no such thing as a perfect palette!

The sketch above of the BioMuseo in Panama City, Panama is an example of a near-perfect CMY triad. As a result, I was able to recreate the colorful structure as well as mix bold darks for shadows. Could the yellow have been a little less red-leaning? Sure, but in the painting, because of the adjacent colors, it reads very yellow and works well. Below is an example of another close to perfect triad. Though a magenta to replace the crimson would have enabled a brighter and more realistic shade of violet in my mixes, I am happy with the results; one of my favorite sketches from the Triadvent series.

During Triadvent I established a routine. I had made small strips of paper listing each of the way-too-many tubes of watercolor pigments I own and placed them in three bags: yellow, magenta, and blue. The secondary colors were added to the category they most leaned toward; yellow-greens landed with the yellows, blue-greens with the blues, etc. There were more than a few times during the challenge that I regretted my choice to include secondary colors at all, since they sometimes led to very obscure color combinations that really stretched the boundaries of yellow, magenta/red, blue for a triad.

Above, I had just one primary color, the yellow, and it was a warm one! Choosing a less-than-realistic sunset depiction of this Casco Viejo, Panama City street enabled me to use the orange, and to substitute the purple where I might normally use a deep blue. Below, the warm yellow, mid-red, and violet left me with a similar scheme, so I stuck with the sunset theme, painting from a photo of my daughter fishing at Race Point Beach years ago.

Despite the challenges created by secondaries, each night I religiously pulled my three colors out of the bags, got the tubes of paint I needed, and prepared for the next day’s triad exercise. Some nights I painted my color wheel then and other nights I started in the morning. I usually included a few three-color mixes as well. I then gave some thought to the kind of scene the colors evoked, Did I have a warm yellow, rosy red and violet blue for the perfect sunset? Or perhaps cool greens and umbers for a winter forest landscape? One of the most fun aspects of the challenge became matching the color scheme to a fitting scene for a sketch. Somewhere along the way I realized that having the colors “dictated” to me forced me to focus on a coordinating scene, and that constraint removed, or at least significantly reduced the open-ended chasm created by the “What do I paint today?” quandary. I’ll admit that the subjects of these sketches were not necessarily near and dear to me, but creating a pathway for a more consistent practice was helping me in unexpected ways. There was little if any pressure to “get it right” in honor of the memory of dm experience. I was able to focus on my craft – gradients, mixing, perspective, etc. It also helped me develop my capacity for choosing appropriate colors for a scene in general. An important skill for urban sketching when assessing and getting started quickly can be essential.

While brown is certainly not magenta, or even red, the PBr25 makes for a lovely rusty color for fall leaves as well as a nice blue-grey for the background when added to Prussian blue. I chose a photo taken by my husband for this endeavor.

This was a tough one; pretty much all secondary colors. Additionally, the combination of quin deep gold as my yellow and burnt umber as my red yielded a narrow range of mixes between the two. Try as I might, I could not create a blue with this triad, though I managed to maximize the somewhat blue-leaning nature of Pthalo Green Yellow Shade to make a gray for the snow shadows and sky. Not my favorite pick, but I like the sketch of a snowy, wooded path…another one taken by my husband!

Sometimes I ended up with a triad that just made me say, “Yuck!” My preferred color schemes do not lean toward completely earthy or more of what I think of as traditional watercolor, where the color schemes are, frankly, watery – lots of greys, umbers, ochres, etc. Here are a few where I sighed a deep sigh before exploring what I could come up with.

The river (or road?) running through a tree-lined valley (above) toward the mountains and the sailboats on a misty sea (below) are original compositions. I had a mood in mind from the triad selection of each, and tried my hand at creating scenes that would highlight the triads.

This beach scene is another original composition. I was curious to try the triad of all granulating weakly pigmented colors, but it certainly didn’t thrill me! Another departure from my typical preference to create bold, colorful works.

Overall, I found Triadvent to be a tremendous learning experience. I particularly enjoyed the challenge of selecting a subject based on the colors I had available to work with, and how that led me to complete a sketch for every day of the moth of December. As many times as I have tried to develop a daily sketching habit, I have failed more. There was something about the combination of constraints and flexibility that hit a sweet spot for me. Read a little more about my thoughts on this at Idyll Sketching. I am very much looking forward to participating in another Triadvent challenge this year… or to creating my own.

A few more sketches that I was really happy with from Triadvent 2025: