Increasing colours by decreasing colours

How to expand your colour range by using less colours!

If you have followed this blog for a while you will know that I am constantly experimenting with colour. I am also searching for the best and simplest kit to take with me when I paint en Plein Air. Now and again these two obsessions meet, and this is the subject of this post.

I have just been re-reading Kevin MacPherson’s wonderful book, Fill Your Oil Paintings With Light and Colour, and he advocates using a very limited range of colours. His choice is ultramarine blue, alizarin crimson, cadmium yellow pale and white). That’s it.

Now I thought my range was limited (ultramarine blue, cerulean blue, cadmium red, cadmium yellow light, plus two earth colours, yellow Ochre and burnt sienna, and of course titanium white.) The earth colours are a quick short cut to these neutral yellow and reds, and I use them all the time. But he suggests getting rid of these and mixing all the secondary and tertiary (muted) colours from just the primaries.

Why would you do this? When you are out painting and time is already short, why spend time mixing up a colour that you already have in a tube? It seems like madness! The only way to find out was to give it a go.

So I laid out his choice of colours (circled above in red), plus cerulean blue that I really need for the Mediterranean skies around here, and began to mix the secondary greens, oranges and violets, and then a few muted colours made from the complementaries (a spot of blue in the orange, a hint of violet in the yellow and a touch of green in the red) and suddenly my palette had become a multicoloured thing of beauty. My imagination raced as I realised the potential of making an infinite array of colours instead of relying on old favourites.

No longer was I held back by just grabbing a brush full of yellow ochre and making do with that. I now had to mix this colour and along the way I was creating all sorts of lovely modifications of it, each with it’s own living colour. Now instead of just using burnt sienna as a shorthand, I was able to mix clean variations of this earth colour that sang out because they came from bright and pure primaries.

Yes there is a bit more work involved in the mixing, but I found this to be quite a therapeutic thing to do before settling down to the concentration of the painting process.

Cabreras tank from a bygone age, oil on board 8″X 8″

So, we will see how this goes, but for now I may have found a way of increasing the colour range of my paintings whilst decreasing the number of tubes I carry with me. Win, win I say!

Please give a thumbs up if you found this post helpful and leave any comments in the box below. Thanks. Happy painting!

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