The choice of colours for a specific piece should be one of the most important decisions at the start of your painting session. My aim is to take you through the key questions you should ask yourself to make the best decision, and introduce you to some of the standard palettes I use.

Habitual or occasional?

Whether your palette is the result of years of trial and error or you change it for each piece, how can you be sure it is the best? Most painters get to know colour combinations that work well and always have them available, such as the old landscape standby – an atmospheric blue/grey achieved by mixing Venetian red and ultramarine blue with white. These tried and tested combinations certainly make it easier to paint, and for the most part it is a great idea to base your palette around what you know and love. This not only makes painting easier by taking the uncertainty out of colour mixing, but over time will give your body of work a cohesive and recognisable style. On the other hand, using the same old colours time and again can deaden your creativity, as well as restrict the range of effects you might create. By changing the ultramarine blue/Venetian red mix to more vibrant modern pigments will challenge your assumptions about colour.

Core palette

My preferred core palette of eight colours suits my style and genre – mostly cool ‘Dutch’ landscapes – to which I add ‘extension’ colours for particular works. Additionally, from time to time I deliberately paint a piece of work with new combinations, particularly if I feel my practice is becoming jaded. What I can’t create, however, are any strong or saturated colours that fall outside of the range made possible by my core palette, the intense yellow of a rape field for example, or the bright red of a post box. If I expect to need these colours I add them to my paint box. In fact the question of intensity is one you must consider for your palette.
My core palette is based around subtractive complementary mixing. It consists of four pairs of colours, any of which can be adjusted in saturation by its opposite, creating an almost infinite range of greyed-down hues. My pairings are red/green, orange/blue, violet/yellow and black/white.
Your core palette should contain the default colours and mixes that define your normal style of working. The longer you work with these colours, the more adept you will become at getting the most from them. The ideal core palette should be limited enough to carry in your paint box and give you a fair chance of covering most situations, without including colours you’ll use every year or so.

Intensity

Colour saturation or intensity can always be reduced by mixing, but never increased. So, if you want to paint in the Old Master style, go for lower saturation colours based mostly on earth pigments such as sienna, umber, terre verte and so on, plus just a couple of brighter ones such as vermilion or ultramarine blue to be used sparingly for accents. This range of colours will compel you to work tonally.
If you prefer Impressionist style painting you will need to use the colours introduced during that period: cadmiums, alizarin, ultramarine, viridian, cobalt and so forth. Your aim should be to create a range of subtractive pairs, ideally with a warm and cool bias of each primary – for example cadmium lemon (cool) and cadmium yellow (warm), to maximize your access to colour mixes. This kind of palette can quickly become large, so you need to make some choices about using (or emphasising) only parts of it in any given work. Given the range of colours here you should find it possible to create all but the most vibrant of modern styles.
Finally, if your aim is to create the intense, high-key colours associated with post-Impressionism, Expressionism or many modern works you should base your palette on the most intense of the new colours such as phthalo blue, phthalo green, perelyne red, dioxanzine purple, hansa yellow or mono orange. With these colours you will create intensely vibrant pictures, but would never be able to capture the subtlety of a Rembrandt!

Opacity

Although relatively unimportant for contemporary painting, consideration of the opacity of individual colours is crucial for creating traditional effects such as imprimaturas or glazes. If these are important to you, work from the principle that it’s always easier to increase opacity than create translucency. A traditional palette should contain zinc or lead white to facilitate this, plus translucent options for each colour. As these considerations are really only necessary for indirect (studio) work the need to transport there extra paints is unimportant.

Quality

Almost any paint you buy from an established colourman should be of reasonable quality. However, when setting a palette I recommend that you use paints from either artist or student grade, as the latter are easily overwhelmed in mixes if used with stronger concentrations of pigment. Finally if you do choose student grade paints, be aware that some of the inexpensive equivalents of genuine pigments (normally labelled ‘hue’) will only be approximate to the real colour in mass tone, and often change dramatically in mixes or if brushed out.

The full article can be found in the January 2011 issue of The Artist.