back to support materialsLimiting your Palette
Some artists prefer to stick to a small range of colours, preferring to mix their own. You can mix a good range of colours with only 2-3 colours plus white.
Limiting your palette can help to simplify things and to avoid overthinking. With oil and cold wax we can get a little carried away with creating textures and when we start to add in a range of colours then paintings can start to get a little busy.
What do I mean by limiting your palette? It's about limiting our colour choices. So try limiting your palette to 4 colours:
- A white
- A dark colour: indigo, paynes grey, burnt umber or black
- A warm colour: orange, Indian yellow, red, magenta, pink
- A cool colour: turquoise, green, blue
Make sure at least one is a translucent colour and that you have some nice bright colours in there.
- Colours are identified as being opaque, transparent and semi-transparent.
- Transparent allows light to pass through: layers of other colours beneath are visible as in glaze or tint
- Opaque absorbs light unless they are heavily diluted.
- If you are not sure whether a paint is transparent or opaque look at the label on the tube.
(Image to be added)
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