The limited palette...

Thea Cable, waxing lyrical about her lovely new Craig Young watercolour palette's latest fitment, reveals that she has some 40 half pans inserted therein. This, she thinks, will cause the limited palette enthusiasts a nasty fit of the collywobbles - and she may be right. It interests me, though: IS she right? I have been a follower of the Michael Willcox School of Colour, which advocates a system applicable to all liquid paint media - a maximum of 12 colours (there's much more to it than just limiting the number of colours, by the way). I've recommended that palette - White; burnt sienna; permanent rose; cadmium red; lemon yellow; cadmium yellow; yellow ochre; raw sienna; pthalo green; pthalo blue; cerulean blue; and ultramarine - as a good teaching palette, and a very useful one for beginners as well as for more experienced artists. Then there's the Anders Zorn palette - black; white; cadmium red or vermilion; and yellow ochre. I haven't recommended that - it's much too specialized and not really applicable for landscape work. In fact, there are all sorts of palettes out there, most of which insist upon a limited range of colours. The claim behind them is generally that if you keep to a small range, a) you'll be able to mix all the colours you require from it (and in truth, the Willcox palette enables you to mix thousands of tints), and b) you'll achieve colour harmony. I have long had my doubts about the latter - while I'm not keen on throwing colours ad lib into a painting, which is usually a sign that you just can't find the right colour and are having a bit of a panic, is a painting going to be more harmonious because you stick to two or three yellows or reds; or because they belong to the same "family"? Obviously I'm familiar - rather OVER familiar, in truth - with the "less is more" mantra: but I think that's much more applicable to composition than to colour: an over-complicated painting without an obvious focus is likely to be a distracting mess. But is the advice true of colours, as well? I have a fair few colours not because I like to use them all in one painting, but because I like to vary them between paintings: I don't always want to be painting my sky the same way, to a formula, nor yet tree trunks, cliffs, or flesh. But I don't restrict myself to just the 12 colours in any given picture - I might use 20; I might use 5.... How about you?

Yup: it's the Bates Palette, officially, now. I don't know how popular it will be across all media, because of one feature - that's a very powerful blue (Pthalo) combined with two quite delicate colours (rose madder quinacridone, Lemon yellow). You make it work, but it would take a lot of getting used to for anyone else, and was presumably arrived at by you only after a good deal of trial and error. While you supplement it now and then with Cadmium red, it's actually a very cold palette; that's not a criticism, but it's a palette that would take a lot of warming up without much help from the transparent and rather cool rose madder quinacridone. I'm not sure I could handle it, at least not in oil .... I'd be itching for ochres, and burnt sienna. Even the cerulean blue (hue) won't be of much help (mixes very well with Lemon yellow, though) because CB (Hue) is invariably a pthalo blue mix; and even genuine coeruleum/cerulean blue is quite a cool colour. It imparts a distinctive look to your paintings, largely by virtue of that dominating blue. but it's strong meat - I wouldn't suggest beginners try it!

Zorn is worth a look - his palette worked well for his portrait and figure work; how he got satisfactory greens with it, I wouldn't know - other than that I don't think he simply used those colours for landscape. I have tried it, for a wintry scene - it worked, but I felt another palette would have worked just as well. There are two main approaches here, even if there are some quite extreme variants on both of them which might lead you to think there was a whole and confusing array of possibilities. One is the very basic palette, favoured by our less-is-more compadres: I have no problem with it in theory, except that it can be a bit of a nuisance if you get too hide-bound by it, and you do have to learn how to mix colours if you're going to employ it. That may sound obvious, but it sometimes causes me pause to think that some people might believe they're doing something wrong if they use a more extensive palette, or believe that they ought to be able to make it work without a lot of practice. The other method is simply to use a lot of colours - what you might call a more-is-more approach. This was essentially Phil Kendall/Meltemi's method with acrylic - he used a lot of colours, he knew (knows) what he's doing with them, and he keeps mixing to a minimum. Thea uses a variant of this one in watercolour, keeping to single pigment, transparent colours, This type of palette - which might consist of almost anything, in quantity - works in response to one of two techniques: either you don't mix, or keep your mixing to a very basic minimum (using the colours straight from tube or pan which others of us would try to mix); or you make a colour chart of all your colours so that you can match whatever you're trying to achieve, and learn what will sit happily next to something else, learn to mix optically, or mix directly. I remember that Shirley Trevena made a colour chart of all the Winsor and Newton watercolours, and referred to it frequently in making her paintings. If it's at all helpful, which it probably isn't, I tend to use a quite severely limited palette in watercolour, and a much wider one in oil and acrylic - but really my approach is a combination of the two methods: I don't go mad with different colours, but if I feel I want - say - a bit of violet, and can get a cleaner one from the tube than I'll get by mixing, I'll reach for the one tube: it depends on the context, which is why I'm not keen on any rigid rules. Amanda mentions Pyrrole red - this is the colour also known as Winsor Red, which is indeed a useful one to try because it's a useful half-way house between scarlet and crimson, and makes great lilacs, violets, and rich, plummy colours. If I abjured an extensive palette, I probably wouldn't use it - which in itself is a good reason to branch out a bit. On the whole, I'd say start with a limited palette - the Willcox one is good (again: white, Burnt Sienna, Quinacridone Violet, Cadmium Red, Raw Sienna, Yellow Ochre, Lemon (Hansa) Yellow, Cadmium Yellow, Pthalo Green, Pthalo Blue, Ultramarine, and Cerulean) - but don't feel you have to be bound by it: see what you can do with it, get to know it intimately, then you can either downsize or spread yourself later. I like a bit of a spread, myself.......