They may not give you the precise colors he uses but he does discuss his use of color as well as his theories {as well as most everything else to do with painting} at some length.
I would guess the usual for the time- which would be natural pigments hand ground and mixed with a binding oil. So things like Burnt Sienna would have been dirt from Sienna. Any modern equivalent will do unless you're going to buy raw metals and stuff and grind them into powder, bind them, etc.
Burnt umber and titanium or lead white. Also yellow ochre, burnt sienna, cadmium red light and cobalt blue. Because of the difficulty of compounding pigments, many artists functioned with limited pallettes. With the above mentioned pigments, a skilled painter can reproduce almost any color. Black is a completely unnecessary pigment.
You mean which colors of paint did he start out with for mixing? It doesn't matter because you can mix any colors you want if you have the basic red, blue, yellow, black, white.
That is a mystery which has not been solved, yet. Because he was experimenting with different materials for his colors, it is difficult today to restore his paintings.
Comments
You might check his notebooks.
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/5000
They may not give you the precise colors he uses but he does discuss his use of color as well as his theories {as well as most everything else to do with painting} at some length.
I would guess the usual for the time- which would be natural pigments hand ground and mixed with a binding oil. So things like Burnt Sienna would have been dirt from Sienna. Any modern equivalent will do unless you're going to buy raw metals and stuff and grind them into powder, bind them, etc.
Burnt umber and titanium or lead white. Also yellow ochre, burnt sienna, cadmium red light and cobalt blue. Because of the difficulty of compounding pigments, many artists functioned with limited pallettes. With the above mentioned pigments, a skilled painter can reproduce almost any color. Black is a completely unnecessary pigment.
You mean which colors of paint did he start out with for mixing? It doesn't matter because you can mix any colors you want if you have the basic red, blue, yellow, black, white.
That is a mystery which has not been solved, yet. Because he was experimenting with different materials for his colors, it is difficult today to restore his paintings.
I often end up asking the same thing on other sites
all of them.