Painter's Pad: The Limited Palette

Welcome to the Painter's Pad.

This little corner of OTIKHTD (big acronym; debating a name change) is all about painting, believe it or not. It's not about pads.

Today's Painter's Pad is all about the limited palette, not to be confused with a limited palate, which would be a serious bummer. What is a limited palette? Well, you know that thing that the guy with the big afro and tender smile holds while he paints wonderful decor works of mountains and grass and cozy cottages and happy accidents? That's a palette.

That's a huge palette.

But the idea of a palette goes beyond the physical wooden board. It's really the colors that you are using. The colors on your palette ARE your palette. It's palette inception.

So, if you think about a palette being limited, you should be envisioning a palette with only a few colors. Initially, this would seem very intimidating. It would be like giving a chef some meat and cheese and a tortilla and telling him to invent a meal. Which is pretty much all of Mexican food. What at first seems a bit like wearing handcuffs is actually much like wearing a sensible pantsuit. You go into it thinking it may be uncomfortable, but end up wanting to fill your closet with them. I've kind of lost my way in these analogies.

The limited palette for those without a limited palate.

Most limited palettes rely on variations of the primary colors. Elementary art would teach you that yellow and red make orange, red and blue make violet, and blue and yellow make green. Elementary art is smart. They taught you well. From a limited palette of three colors, we have easily made six. Of course, you can vary the amounts of each color that you blend in order to create even more variation. And then you can blend those colors to string even more colors out. If you went crazy with it, you could be like a magician pulling a color spectrum scarf out of your sensible pantsuit.

One of the great artists of our time, Corky St. Clair

The pure grace of White helps in all of this. For instance, you may start out with yellow ochre (your yellow), burnt sienna (your red), and ultramarine blue (your blue). From these colors, you will begin to blend and get more varieties and hues. You will even benefit from blending some of the colors from opposite ends of the color spectrum (known as complementary colors) to find interesting neutral hues. Then, you can string all of your colors out by slowly mixing white into your color creations, producing a range of hues that are really all you could need for a gorgeous painting.

And the beauty of it is that because you started with only three colors and a tint (white), your invented colors will all act harmoniously. It's very similar to music. A song in a chromatic scale (using all of the notes) is far more dangerous and easy to screw up than a song within a key, utilizing a specific scale, with only a few chords and variations on those chords. I feel like my analogies are improving.

A self portrait by Lucian Freud, utilizing a limited palette and some hog-hair.

Look at the above image by Lucian Freud. These colors harmonize very well and you end up with a portrait that is very neutral looking, with maybe a greenish-brown overall hue. But, if you look closely at the colors that he is using, you begin to see the reds and the blues and the variety of colors that he found using a very limited palette. You see the same effect in most artists' works. It is our brains and our eyes that trick us into thinking the artist is probably using a cavalcade of different paints. Below is a Degas. At first glance it is simply a remarkable painting with a host of different tones and shades and colors, but upon closer inspection you will start to find that same effect of harmony which a limited palette brings. He's not using a bunch of different reds or yellows or greens or blues. He's creating them through mixture and tint. 

Degas being De Man (sorry, that's inexcusable)

And, lest you think all limited palettes be drab, here's a limited Monet

The strength in the limited palette lies in its flexibility within its dependable constraints. Using the colors I chose above, I would create a vastly different feeling than if I used cadmium yellow, cadmium red, and pthalo blue. There are a wide variety of yellows, reds, and blues in the painter's repertoire, so the combinations begin to open up and seem limitless. Especially when you consider the fact that a grey can be your yellow or your blue or your red, depending upon color relationships and relativity. But I will save that for another post.

For now, focus on experimenting with your limited palette and finding what you can accomplish within it. Try different yellows, reds, and blues. Introduce one other accent color. Be adventurous. Be courageous. Be fun.