I’m on my limited palette kick after reading Hazel Soan‘s The Art of the Limited Palette, and I have more thoughts!
How do you go about building or choosing a limited palette for a particular painting? It’s easy to default to a primary triad (blue/yellow/red), the most common type of limited palette, but what are the other options? From my observations of Soan’s examples in her book and other sources, I’ve categorized common patterns.
Types of limited palettes
1 Color
Monochrome
A single color at different dilutions. Typically uses a dark transparent color with a wide value range, e.g. indigo, sepia, black.
Great for: value studies, emphasizing form over color.
2 Colors
Blue & Brown
Two colors: a blue and a brown (aka earth tone).
Great for: Many landscapes, as it can typically cover the colors for land, sky/sea, and some neutral browns in the middle. Yellowish earth tones such as Yellow Ochre can also mix greens.
Complementary Pair
A complementary pair (e.g. blue/orange, red/green, yellow/violet).
Great for: Showing contrast, mixing neutrals, emphasizing light/shadow or warm/cool dichotomies.
3 Colors
Primary Triad
A blue, a yellow, and a red of some kind.
Great for: Almost anything. This is the most common scenario and it is very flexible, especially if you take a loose definition of what counts in each category. With the three primaries, you can mix all the secondaries (some more vividly than others, depending on the primaries chosen), and neutrals by mixing all three colors.
Any Other Triad
Any other type of triad is less common, because you lose some of the color wheel if you eliminate any of the primary three, but creative combinations are possible and may work well for specific scenes where at least one of the primary colors is not needed.
I typically find my way to a non-primary triad by tweaking another pattern. For example:
- It’s a primary triad, but one or more of the primaries is replaced with a related secondary (e.g. green, yellow, red)
- It’s a primary triad, but one or more of the primaries is replaced with a related earth tone (e.g. blue, raw sienna, burnt sienna)
- It’s a complementary pair, but one of the colors is “split” into a warm and cool pair (e.g. red, yellow-green, blue-green)
4 Colors
The more colors you add, the harder it is to categorize the types of paintings, and there are thousands of ways to make four colors work. But as with “other” triads, I find the most common thing to do is to tweak a primary triad.
Triad + Neutral
Builds on a primary triad by adding a neutral/muted/earth color (e.g. black, burnt sienna), to increase the range or convenience of desaturated colors and/or darks.
Great for: almost any situation, but especially realism (where muted/desaturated colors are especially necessary) and plein air (where convenience is especially helpful).
Triad + Accent
Builds on a primary triad by adding a particularly strong or unusual accent color.
For example, you might use Phthalo Green for a pop green. Sure, you can mix a green from your blue and yellow, but nothing will be as bright as unmixed Phthalo Green. Or you might drop Opera Pink into your sunset, without sacrificing your ability to make muted mauves from a more ordinary red.
Great for: Scenes with an extremely distinctive pop of color. By not using it for color harmony, you create additional contrast with the rest of the painting, which may be an effect you want. It also frees you up to do different things with your primaries. This is a great way to work in those fun special fx colors that are too distinctive, bold, opaque, granulating, etc. to be useful as a workhorse primary.
Triad + Split
Builds on a primary triad by splitting one of the primary colors (the blue, yellow, or red) into two versions, typically a warm and a cool.
For example, you might use Cobalt Turquoise for the distinctive hue of a tropical sea, while still using Ultramarine Blue as your primary blue for shadows and setting darks. Or you might explore autumn leaves using both a crimson and a scarlet.
Great for: Scenes where you want to emphasize and explore a particular area of the color wheel and a wide range of analogous colors, without losing your ability to mix the rest of the hues
More Colors
Once you get into 5 or more colors, I really do think it’s impossible to categorize, and I also think that 6+ colors is the point where I start to find that color harmony is weakened. I say this as a person who has almost always used 6+ colors in any painting until making a concerted effort very recently to limit the colors.
Quick Quiz
So, what type of limited palette should you choose? The tl;dr is that you should probably just go with a primary triad (some kind of blue, yellow, and red). There is an art all its own to choosing the right primary triad, which is mainly the subject of Hazel Soan’s book (and something I’m exploring in my paintings right now.)
But if you’re also wondering if this is an opportunity to try something else other than a primary triad, here are some questions to ask yourself:
- Do I want to emphasize value and form? (Consider monochrome.)
- Do I want to emphasize contrast and dichotomies (e.g. warm/cool)? (Consider a complementary pair.)
- In the scene I want to paint, is there an extremely bold pop color? (Start from there and either build a triad around it or add it to a workhorse triad.)
- In the scene I want to paint, is any entire primary category missing? That is, am I painting a scene with no red, no yellow, or no blue? (Consider dropping or swapping out one of the primaries. For example, in a landscape with green grass and blue skies, red may be dropped or more usefully swapped for an earth color.)
- In the scene I want to paint, is any color category extremely wide-ranging with a lot of different shades? (Consider “splitting it”, that is, using two versions of this color.)
- Do I need to make up for limitations in my other palette colors? (For example, if you chose a triad with an opaque color that makes it impossible to mix dark colors, you may want to add a dark neutral.)
Conclusion
Of course not every limited palette will fall into one of the categories I’ve set out, and art is all about trying new stuff. But I find the paralysis of the blank page to be difficult, so it’s often more inspiring for me to begin to impose limits and structure, to find patterns and “rules”, or at least reasons, for choosing one option over another. Rather than boiling down the magic, I hope that enumerating some templates or patterns for limited palettes has inspired you. It has me!