Welcome to a new series where I take a look at a specific limited palette, usually consisting of 3 colors. This is inspired by my newfound interest in limited palettes (after reading Hazel Soan’s book), and also by my need to find a new post series now that I’m no longer doing Color Spotlights because I have tried (almost) every color available to me.
We’re starting with kind of a weird one! Instead of a traditional blue, yellow, and red, this is a blue, green-yellow, and earth orange. I used 3 Daniel Smith colors: Indanthrone Blue (PB60), Rich Green Gold (PY129), and Transparent Red Oxide (PR101).
Individual Pairs
Indanthrone Blue + Transparent Red Oxide
Indanthrone Blue + TRO is one of my favorite classic combinations. The two are complements and create a neutral black when mixed in balance. The various combinations are also great and include shadowy blues and a wide variety of browns. This is a top-notch landscape combination.
Indanthrone Blue + Rich Green Gold
Indanthrone Blue and Rich Green Gold is also one of my favorite combinations! The combination of the violet-y moody blue and bold, yellow-green mix a wide variety of excellent landscape greens, from glowing sap greens to deep piney shades.
Rich Green Gold + Transparent Red Oxide
This is the weak link combination. I don’t think it looks particularly nice. It’s like evil Quin Gold. But it does not need to be used much and, if you mix it accidentally, will look fine in a landscape context.
Painting
I chose this palette to repaint day 9 of Kolbie Blume’s 10-day Painting the Wilderness challenge when I retried it a few weeks ago.
In my 2021 attempt, I had used 5 colors for this painting. I’d still used Indanthrone Blue and Rich Green Gold, and I had used Quin Gold, Pyrrol Scarlet, and Viridian. This time I decided that in the interest of limiting my palette, Viridian could be cut (Indanthrone + RGG make a perfectly good green) and that the gold and scarlet, neither of which are needed individually in this scene, could be combined into a single muting/warming mixer – TRO.
Unmixed RGG is the star of the show in the sunlit mountain. Unmixed Indanthrone Blue is used for the sky – it’s usually a color I find too dull for skies, but it works here. TRO is not present unmixed in the painting; it is used mainly to create neutral blacks and grays with IB, as well as the muted slatey blues in the water and the distant mountains. I enjoyed how all three colors together could be used to create very dark greens, darker and more muted even than the dark greens made from IB + RGG; similar to the effect of adding green to black.
Conclusion
By combining two of my favorite Indanthrone Blue combos I wound up with a nonconventional triad that’s great for green landscapes, especially where sunlit green is a showstopper. This palette is a green-and-brown specialist – there’s a lot it can’t do, such as yellow, orange, red, violet, or bright blue – but green-and-brown is often what you want for landscapes!