3 Tips for Painting With a Limited Palette

Here’s a small painting fresh off the easel, New Zealand, Botanical Gardens. I used a limited palette for this one. Just four colors plus titanium white. Alizarin crimson, transparent red oxide, cadmium yellow, and ultramarine blue.

Painting with a limited palette is an interesting exercise and I suggest you try it yourself from time to time. There’s no better way to learn color mixing and expand your understanding of color. It forces you to mix your own colors. It also forces you to think outside the box when there’s a color on the subject you simply cannot mix.

In light of this, here are three tips for painting with a limited palette:

1. What Are the Strengths and Limitations?

Painting with a limited palette means reducing the gamut (range) of possible colors at your disposal. It’s important to understand these limitations. Otherwise, you may find yourself trying to mix an impossible color, such as trying to mix vivid green with ultramarine blue and cadmium yellow.

My color palette of alizarin crimson, transparent red oxide, cadmium yellow, and ultramarine blue is strong in the warm colors but lacking in the cooler colors. I could mix vivid oranges but the greens and purples won’t be as saturated.

I believe one of the most versatile limited color palettes would be magenta, cadmium yellow (or cadmium yellow light depending on the brand), and cerulean blue (or something close to primary cyan). From this you can mix vivid greens, oranges, and purples. You can see what I mean in the color wheel I mixed below.

2. Can You Inject Life in Other Ways?

If you’re using less color, you may need to inject life into the painting in other ways. That may be in the form of texture and visible brushwork, value contrast (light against dark), saturation contrast (dull against vivid), intricate drawing, etc. In my painting, I took advantage of impasto and directional brushwork to make up for the lack of color variance. You can see the texture in the side-on photo below.

3. Consider the Subject When Selecting Your Colors

A limited palette may not feel that limiting if you match the subject to the color palette. That’s what I did. My color palette favors warm colors, and the subject features mostly strong warm colors and weak cool colors. There are no strong greens or purples or blues. So I didn’t feel that limited for choice, even though I only had four colors on my palette, plus titanium white. However, I did find myself missing cadmium red for those red autumn leaves in the background.

I’ll have a timelapse video for you in a few days showing you how this painting came together. In the meantime, check out our Landscape Painting Masterclass if you want to learn more.

Happy painting!

Dan Scott

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