Limited Palettes

I find it helpful to switch painting
gears every once in a while to get out of a rut or keep from getting into one in the first place. I need to not get too comfortable or my work gets stale. So I shake things up from time to time by making an abrupt change in something: painting surfaces, sizes, brushes, subject matter, etc. One strategy I’ve used several times is limiting my palette. At different times I’ve painted with one, two, three and four colors (plus white).

As you limit the number of colors on the palette, value becomes more important. One color plus white is mostly about value—except for “little” things like

Wood Strawberry
Merchant’s Island, ME
Carl Judson © 2004
Oil on museum board, 6" x 8".
“Four cobalts” limited palette.

composition, line, mass, shape, movement, texture, etc. I tend gradually to get too literal about color in the things I paint, so that I’m painting more and more what “I know” and less and less what “I’m experiencing.” Not only does

a limited palette force me to focus more on value, but it frees me up to accept (by necessity) colors that aren’t “real” but still can work and are often interesting, as in these paintings.

A classic three-color palette for oil
painters is ultramarine blue, alizarin crimson and yellow ochre (I prefer Indian yellow). Admittedly, there are a whole range of greens (and reds and yellows and blues) that you just can’t get with this palette.

Yarrow, Merchant’s Island, ME
Carl Judson © 2004
Oil on museum board, 6" x 8".
“Four cobalts” limited palette.

Even so, the results are frequently rewarding and include paintings that tend to be more harmonized and unified and often have a distinct mood. Corot’s paintings come to mind as limited palette paintings that set a mood.

Other examples of limited palette paintings I’ve noticed over the years include monochrome paintings in blue by Fredrick Remington and many of Russell Chatham’s paintings that look like they were painted only with blue,
orange and white.

Some of the limited palettes I’ve
used are:

• ultramarine blue, alizarin crimson and Indian yellow
• chrome oxide green and cadmium orange
• the “four cobalts”—cobalt green, cobalt blue, cobalt violet and aureolin (cobalt yellow)
• cobalt violet, alizarin crimson, cadmium red and cadmium orange.
  

Wild Mustard
Merchant’s Island, ME
Carl Judson © 2004
Oil on museum board, 6" x 8".
“Four cobalts” limited palette.

The “four cobalts” is a cheery pastel palette that works well in many landscapes. All four of the pigments are expensive, but small landscapes use so little paint that cost needn’t be an overriding factor. The cobalts all dry very quickly, making them ideal for travel painting. To take maximum advantage of their quick drying properties, I use them with flake (lead) white, which itself dries very quickly. All of the cobalts and flake white are toxic, so I take care not to rub my eyes, pick my teeth, scratch my nose or eat potato chips until I’m through painting and have washed my hands.

Daisies, Merchant’s Island, ME
Carl Judson © 2004
Oil on museum board, 6" x 8".
“Four cobalts” limited palette.

Using a limited palette from just
one part of the spectrum offers interesting possibilities. I once used the violet through orange palette previously mentioned over several months for nude figure painting. I could readily imagine a green through violet palette for landscapes. In addition to the creative and disciplinary advantages of limited palettes are the practical benefits: travel and painting is considerably less daunting with four or five tubes of paint instead of a dozen or more. Limited palettes are less complicated—I find that I spend a lot less time mixing color, and more time on pictorial issues, when I’m painting with three or four colors than when I’m using my usual twelve color palette.