The Basics
A limited palette by convention is not an arbitrary black and white palette or a two-color or three-color palette which in the past has sometimes been required of illustrators because of printing limitations. Just because we are talking about a limited palette doesn’t mean we can’t follow the ideas put forth in the pamphlet about rational palette design here. To review the basic of palette design:
- 1. The paints we choose have to be able to make a dark and white (with watercolor we have to depend on dilution and the white of the paper for white or succumb to using white gouache — which many people do, particularly to reclaim the whites lost by mistake.)
- 2. We need some “eye candy”, some spots of real color.
- 3. You should include your favorite paints. If you like the way Cerulean blue granulates like I do, you should include it
- 4. You can have a “convenience” color if you know you’re going to use a lot of it like green, which, of course, you could mix. However, as I point out below for limited palette types their convenience color is one that helps in making grays like burnt umber.
- 5. Then you have to decide about how saturated you want your overall palette to be. (With only a few paints, maximum saturation is pretty much impossible. See here. but there is still some leeway.)
So at a minimum you have to choose a red, yellow, and blue, the mixing complements (for visual complements see here), but you should not have the illusion that you can mix all the visible colors with such a palette. That’s a myth. See here. In fact, there are many people who say you can pick any three colors and do an interesting painting if they are hopefully sufficiently far apart from each other on the color wheel (which, of course, means that they will be somewhat red, somewhat blue, and somewhat yellow.)
Let’s assume you are going to have 6 paints. Why six? Because you use very little watercolor on a painting and a few dabs can be carried around very easily in a Sucret box, Altoid box, or something like that. See absolutely smallest watercolor set here.
Here’s one approach that is basically a double primary palette but not with one warm and one cool, but one saturated and one unsaturated –a very important distinction — which I think I may have invented :
THE BASIC PAINTS: Most of the painting is done with these. This is a “dead color” (desaturated, grayed) group. (I’m choosing to go for very unsaturated.}
1. raw sienna (transparent) or yellow ochre (opaque) for yellow
2. burnt sienna, Winsor Newton “light red”, or Indian Red for red
3. French Ultramarine Blue or Cobalt Blue for blue. If you were working in oil, you could use black because in dilution with white and in the right context it will read as blue.
THE EXTRA FOR TOUCHES OF COLOR. I use these sparingly usually at the end of a painting for eye candy. I also have them around in case I really must mix an intense secondary color like orange, violet, or green.
4. New Gamboge for yellow
5. Cerulean Blue for blue
6. Vermillion for red
(A dark can be made from burnt sienna and ultramarine blue.)
Here’s what it looks like in the new Altoids “small” tin. (The bottom left and right small pans have their corner cut with a jig saw to fit):
COMMENTARY
The extremely limited palette seems to be the palette with which every painting teacher starts his or her students off. It is basically a “tonal” palette. You can capture exact values of the subject and thus the “where” but not the exact colors (the what). What I mean by that is that in a painting done with an extremely limited palette you might not be able to tell if the subject is a small grapefruit, a lime, or a large orange because the color will be inaccurate, but exactly where it is and its form can be pinned down very well. And, more importantly to the students surprise, the painting usually turns out to be a good one that is well liked. The lesson, of course, is tonal value trumps color, and that too many high intensity colors in a painting don’t work.
An extremely limited palette is probably more common in oils where, in place of a careful graphite drawing invariably recommended by watercolor teachers, the initial forms are often outlined casually with a crude oil paint drawing or not outlined at all but blocked in from the start. The way it’s sometimes said is that the drawing is “found” within the painting. Another reason it is so popular might be that, without lots of colors, it’s very hard to get a lot of detail since lines indicate where outlines change but also where there are color changes, and you can’t do color changes with a limited palette well. That way the student starts off simplifying and painting the large important forms and is more conscious of edges (hard and soft) and values. If one starts off a watercolor with a tight, comprehensive drawing, this palette makes less sense.
With a tight drawing, and if you don’t decide to cover up the drawing with washes that completely obscure it, you will get a “colored drawing” not a watercolor painting. A limited palette discourages this approach.
From a technical point of view to use a limited palette in watercolor I would recommend a large mop brush usually made from squirrel hair (“petite gris” in french.) It can hold a lot of water for broad washes and it has a fine point (some don’t, so be sure to get one that points.) It differs from the Kolinsky brush in that it holds more water/paint (and you can afford a larger size as well for even more water) but it does not snap back like a Kolinsky. It can be limp like the household mop it is named after, but that characteristic is excellent for washes whether on the floor or on watercolor paper. But the point is that every time you make a mark with it you have to decide whether you want a wash with soft edges or a hard edge (made with the point). For example, you wash in mop-wise the sky, but, when you come down to a roof top, you use the point to carve it out –without having to pick up more paint.
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This particular page on the extremely limited palette is one of the most viewed pages in this blog, so I have to also add the idea itself seems to intrigue people.
With a very limited palette there’s a lot of important things to concentrate on besides hues. You might start by doing the following steps:
- 1. draw the picture boundary. It immediately sets up the compositional issues. Or use masking tape which will not only establish the picture boundary but will make it very clear when you remove it at the end of the painting.
- 2. draw a notation, an arrow for example, for the direction of the light, and also note what direction it’s moving if you’re outdoors.
- 3. mark the eye level, the horizon. Many artists feel this is very important.
- 4. look for what Sargent called “the effect” , the spot in the painting (and in the motif) in which there’s a sharp demarcation between the lightest light and the darkest dark (next to each other) which should be in one of the main areas of interest. Interestingly enough it is the watercolorist Charles Reid who emphasizes this in this books. In portraits he often finds it around the eyes and nose. (see my posts on composition for more about this.)
- 5. ”Shape weld”, remove the demarcation between closely aligned shapes to make the picture look less busy. There a good post on the subject on the Gurney’s Journey blog here. The point is to connect things to each other. Otherwise they look cut out or pasted on the painting. Charles Reid makes this point with the cast shadow and cautions to always connect it to the dark on the form. It really does prevent a cutout look.
- 6. In a tonal painting it’s a good game to challenge yourself to make various objects in different combination of value contrasts: dark on light, light on dark, dark on dark, and light on light particularly if there are four of anything like car wheels or the spokes of a windmill.
In summary there’s a lot to think about and do with a severely limited palette, and that’s probably why it’s suggested by teachers as a first exercise so much.
With a limited palette there has to be a lot of mixing of paints and the mixtures are often only subtly different, most of them almost neutrals. The result is often a very painterly painting or a painting that painters like.
Here’s an visual example of a limited palette:
This is Anders Zorn, the Swedish painter, in self-portrait with his palette of vermillion, yellow ochre, white, and in the back (a little hard to see) black out of which, presumably, this self-portrait was constructed. In fact the extremely limited palette is sometimes called a Zorn palette. It is most successful with flesh colors, particularly in Zorn’s hands (see model in the background), and least with landscapes. Since we usually don’t use white in watercolor, I don’t think we can do as much as Zorn did.
The astonishing thing about it, as I’ve already said, is that black mixed with white reads as blue particularly if the passage is surrounded by blue’s visual (not mixing) complement (yellow) . (I haven’t found this to be the case with just diluting black watercolor paint.) One of the reason might be that the black that works best is a blue black, that is a carbon black to which blue pigment has been added. Adding a little ochre to the “blue” from diluted black gets us a green or adding instead some red will show as a “smoky” violet. The ocher and the vermillion produce a fairly robust orange.
Isn’t this the primary palette of which I am so dismissive in the next chapter? Not really. In the primary palette the most intense versions of the colors are used. In the limited palette Yellow Ochre is not bright Yellow, Black is not brilliant Blue, and the reds used by most artists are earth reds. You could call it a desaturated (primary) palette or a “dead color palette” (desaturating a hue was, and still is, called “killing” the color). In many ways “dead color” palettes and extremely limited palettes in practice are very similar.
However Birgitta Sanstrom the director of the Zorn Collections in Mora, Sweden can’t understand how this limited palette became associated with Zorn since, among other reasons, they found 17 tubes of cobalt blue (among 243 tubes of all sorts of pigments beside ochre, black, and vermillion) in his studio when in died. Thus one might say the self-portrait here involves a little bit of public relationship image making as well as self-portrait painting.
The “Zorn” palette is a modification of the carbon black, yellow earth color, white, and red earth color palette of Bronze Age Greek painting where the limited palette was a matter of necessity not choice.
This kind of a limited palette has been called by many names besides Zorn’s: the Velasquez palette, the Goya palette, and sometimes the “dead color” palette.
Here is a palette, albeit difficult to see even in the original, in a self-portrait by Murillo in the National Gallery in London, the one in which his image appears in a mirror but his hand just happens to poke through the mirror and hold the frame of the mirror (it’s dedicated to his kids, so perhaps this is a joke for them) :
Bartolome Esteban Murillo palette
The first row of the palette has white on the left. Then comes probably yellow ochre, a desaturated red, the next color is hard to see but it looks like a cool red to me, them brown (?), and finally black. Of course, this is oil paint.
I should hasten to mention that Murillo’s palette was composed of the paints he was going to use that day. He had to prepare the paints (there were no tubes), and it was expensive to have to throw away paints you weren’t going to use on the area you were painting. Murillo’s palette, and in fact most palettes shown in painting (for example, Elzabeth LeBrun’s self portrait) seem to be the paints that would be used to paint flesh.
I have a theory about why the limited palette works so well. I can’t prove it, but using it forces you to have a wide value range and very clearly defined light coming into a dark space picking out salient features (like, for Zorn apparently, the legs of his model). Since we live in environments with multiple lights coming at us from all directions, the shadows are confusing. This palette makes viewing easy, and I think cognitive science is discovering that good painting make it easy for the viewer’s visual system to “get” it. There has to be a little bit of simplification and exaggeration to read that which is being portrayed in the painting.
Another thought I had is that the paintings with limited palettes are naturally dark and desaturated. In this context really saturated passages and really high value pop out as luminous. Luminous is defined as higher in value, that is lighter, than passages that are perceived as white. Zorn’s smock is presumed to be white, but look at the white paint on his palette and see how is shines because it is “whiter than white”. The red on the palette is also bright because it is the least desaturated spot on the painting. His face also seems to be in real light for the same reason.
There are two ways that an extremely limited palette is often modified: 1. change the paints to more modern, less desaturated ones and/or 2. add more paints
changing paints
What Zorn did was substitute a stronger red for an earth red like burnt sienna of Indian red. Some other popular modifications are to keep the Indian Red but replace black with a blue, usually Ultramarine. It’s interesting that Yellow Ochre or raw sienna usually stays on the palette. It’s a palette that’s fun to use even without the white used by oil painters because you have to focus on the value structure and the warm/cool dimension. You also watch your edges more. This really makes you pin down the structure of what you are representing and the light. It’s really amazing how satisfying and popular the results can be.
Of course as you change the red, yellow, and blue to more saturated paints, you wind up with the primary color palette and the whole exercise ceases to be a limited palette in the sense that is usually meant by the term, but that actually adds proof that “limited” here also means desaturated, “dead color”.
adding paints
The obvious first paint to add is green. Keeping with the “dead color” approach, you might add a green earth or move up to a more saturated green. However, as soon as you start adding a lot more paints, the palette changes category.
the multiple primary palette
Check out my post on the primary palette myth for my discussion of a palette with lots of different red, blue, and yellow paints which I happen to like.
Recent discussion on the internet of limited palettes
James Gurney has a good post on limited palettes here (be sure to read the comments as well.)
There is another discussion of “three color palettes” by Stapleton Kearns here in his March 21st, 20011 post. He warns that, if you do a lot of paintings with the same limited palette and have a show, all your paintings are going to look alike. He also points out that you are depriving yourself of being able to paint the shadow side of a form with a different version of the same hue (e.g. cadmium red for the light and Alizarin Crimson for the dark.) , and without a cool and warm of each hue it’s hard to control the color temperature.
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