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"Good Grief Woman! Get a Grip!"  -  The Angst of Limiting Your Palette

• When I go to an art supply store, I am seduced by the wonderful paint colors. Now, after having spent any number of dollars, I have a box full of paints I love but never use. This makes me wonder whether you have any advice about how to choose a palette.
• What's the difference between student paints and professional paints? How does one know when to step up?
  

     Sidney Oliver

Because my previous residence for 25 years was in the middle of a forest, when I built and moved into my studio, I went hog wild and pig silly when early spring appeared. That first year and for a few years after, I wanted every flowering shrub and tree I saw at the garden nurseries. At some point, I said, "Good Grief Woman! Get a Grip!" You see, I had been seduced by the colors just like artists are seduced by those sexy colors at art supply stores. Most of those flowering shrubs and trees that I bought came to naught in my garden just like most of those tantalizing paints come to naught on your palette.

I have learned to strive for the substantial, not the frivolous.  

And yet, we are all victims. We all have way too many paints and way too many brushes. Owning them is not the problem. The problem is putting a preponderance of them on the palette at once. With so many options, being overwhelmed is a given.

While preparing for each painting, the motto should be One In-One Out.

It's as simple as that.

Take a lot of time figuring out your core palette with the three primary colors as your base and then branch out to the absolute necessities.

* If the above example bothers you because the paint goes outside the circles, forget it. This is not a paint-by-numbers series. Being a painter includes knowing when to tell the difference between staying in the circle & when to willingly venture outside that circle.

I use the exact same watercolor palette I've used since 1978. The three primaries: Cadmium Red, Aureolin Yellow, & French Ultramarine Blue. Raw Sienna & Burnt Sienna are the 2 earth colors. Raw Sienna is added rather than Yellow Ochre because Raw Sienna is not staining. Yellow Ochre can easily turn into mud. Brown Madder is added. It can be nicely mixed to produce great color combinations. Cerulean Blue rather than my favorite of Manganese Blue, which is no longer available other than in a hue, which is not the same due to the chemistry involved. Antwerp Blue is added because it can make nice greens. Those are the 8 colors that are my mainstays in watercolor. I can achieve any color combination I want from those 8.

When painting with watercolors, only mix in 2 color combinations. When using three color combinations, mud is easy to manufacture.

Below is an example where I primarily used:

Burnt Sienna + French Ultramarine Blue

Brown Madder + Manganese Blue

This painting was chosen for the Knoxville Dogwood Arts Festival in 1987 & I am shown on the left presenting it to Willard Scott on The Today Show.

The tree, roof, chimney, & wagon are all used with the combination of Burnt Sienna & French Ultramarine Blue. The house with its shadows are painted

with the mixture of Brown Madder + Manganese Blue.

The paintings above are large watercolors (30X40" & 20X30"). Both were painted with the aforementioned limited palette. 

Folks, you don't need a lot of colors.

I traveled and painted around England with my mother for 9 weeks during the spring of 2001. My oil palette consisted of:

Cadmium Yellow

Cadmium Red

French Ultramarine Blue

Permanent Green (Worthless as you can make your own green. Never again.)

Burnt Sienna

White

On previous painting trips, I used a 6X8" pochade box. In 2001 I used an 8X10" Open Box M. My painting surface of choice is Ampersand Art's Gessobord.

Above is the pochade box set up with a limited palette in oils. The palette has changed somewhat by using the One In One Out rule. In the studio, I would squeeze out a few more choices, but my habit is to use as few colors as possible.

You will want to know those colors intimately so that you can mix them perfectly. It's difficult becoming intimate with a variety of paints with which you aren't particularly familiar. Experiment by mixing every color with every other color. In watercolor make a chart of this. In oils, memorize the combinations.

By using few colors your painting automatically becomes more cohesive because there are no outliers on the panel, canvas, or paper.

Artists are always taught to paint in terms of 1, 3, 5, etc. Odd numbers. Paint one cow, three pears, 5 trees. Even numbers of objects are boring to the eye. I have found that if I do use a red, for instance, somewhere else in the painting I need to use two more reds. They can be only a semblance or a hint of red, but a red nonetheless. This isn't about the color red, but it is about a color that would be an outlier and not used elsewhere in the painting. What if you had 5 outlier colors in one painting? The painting would be quite dizzying if you had dots all over the place of these disconnected colors. Not that you want a painting that is harmonious, which isn't particularly desirable, but you certainly don't want a kaleidoscope of wild colors thrown about. You want the painting to be cohesive without being boring. The most perfect way to do this with no effort is to limit your palette. Cohesion becomes automatic.

As for Sidney's last question, don't use student grade paints-- period. Always use professional or artist grade paints. Student grade paints don't give you true colors or the correct consistency. Use the best paints you can afford.

Enjoy the process!

   Ruthie Windsor-Mann

This post is part of a series of Q & As between Ruthie Windsor-Mann and Sidney Oliver. 

We invite the reader to join in with other questions in the comments section. This needs to be interactive in order to work.

All photographs are by Ruthie Windsor-Mann unless otherwise credited.

Copyright 2019 Ruthie Windsor-Mann All Rights Reserved