Painters have a wide variety of ‘tube colors’ to use in trying to achieve their desired hues. I’ve got 30 or 40 tubes of almost every color you can imagine, most of them untouched. For quite awhile, I’ve opted to limit the number of tubes I use, challenging myself to mix a broad variety of colors from a handful of basic hues. Painters call this a ‘limited palette’. It lightens the load of what you have to carry around with you and it helps give a unity of color to your painting. Nice attributes.

There’s no specified set of colors for a limited palette. In the past, I’ve typically used a ‘split primary’ group, which includes two versions of each primary color, plus white and maybe black. Each of the two selected primaries ‘bends’ toward a different adjacent secondary color. For instance, cadmium red tends toward orange (yellow), while alizarin crimson tends toward a purple (blue). Blues may include phtalo or cerulean blue which tend toward green (yellow) and ultramarine blue which leans toward purple (red). Split yellows might include cadmium yellow light, which tends green (yellow), and cadmium yellow, which tends toward orange/red.

If you want to mix a bright saturated orange using such a palette, you’d combine cadmium red and cadmium yellow, rather than alizarin red and/or cadmium yellow light – a combo that produces duller, less saturated oranges. And so on.

Here are a few of my paintings using the split primary palette.

More recently, as a result of a zoom class with Bernie Dellario and a number of painting buddies, I’ve been working with an even MORE limited palette — just three primaries + white & a neutral earth red: Hansa yellow; pyrole red; ultramarine blue; transparent red oxide and Titanium white. What a challenge, but I think I’m getting the hang of mixing a broad range of colors from these meager starting points. Here are some recent paintings using this palette.