Rules of Color Mixing
Cedar Lee January 20th, 2010
I recently expressed my excitement about the color red on Facebook, and my painter friend Ron Ogle reminded me to always use more than one shade of red when using red in a painting.
This got me thinking about the rules of the palette, and how rules can vary greatly from artist to artist. I think that when it comes to color mixing, there is no absolute right and wrong. What is right is a personal decision highly dependent on the individual painter’s vision, technique and process.
I asked some of my painter friends the following: Do you think there are rules for mixing colors? Do you limit your palette, and if so, what colors do you use?
Here are some of the responses I got:
“Today on my palette I have two yellows, orange, light red and alizarin crimson, sap green, cobalt, ultramarine and cerulean blues, dioxazine purple, black, lots of white. Basically the color spectrum. From there I paint everything. I got here mainly through doing plein-air and wishing to travel light.” ~David Nakabayashi
“I limit my color palette to 9 colors – I never mix them – for consistency reasons across my paintings. I like the challenge of my limited palette in using to create depth in my work.” ~Shai Steiner
“Unlimited palette here. I visualize the color I want and go for the coolness or warmth I need and if it’s not quite right, I glaze layers over it until it’s what I want.” ~Nancy Dunn
“I’m a slob. I push paint around until I get what I like.” ~Marc Pitman
I have several new Sunflower Heart paintings on a drying rack in my studio, waiting to be photographed. Here’s a sneak peek!
My personal approach to color is to limit my palette for each painting, but I don’t use the same colors every time. Before beginning a new painting, I think about what colors I’d like and lay them out. I’m not “allowed” to use any colors except those for that painting (and if I’ve chosen well, I don’t want to.)
My friend Matt (not a painter, but a writer) expressed his doubt: “The way I look at it, if a painter limits his palette to a certain amount, it’s like a writer only being able to use certain words.”
You’d think that to be the case, but in my experience, limiting your palette forces you to get good at mixing colors. If you are forced to make your own green from yellow, blue, red & white, you’ll end up with an infinite variety of interesting greens and in the process, learn a lot about green. A literary analogy would be poetry: when writing a sonnet, you’re limited by the structure of the sonnet and are forced to find good words that fit into that structure, sound beautiful, and have meaning. You may end up being more creative as a result.
When I first started painting, I was a little kid. I didn’t start my learning process with anything fancy–I was given only a few basic colors to start with. Mixing colors to achieve a desired result is now second nature to me, and I only have to think about it subconsciously if at all. I learned this skill mostly by practicing with the primary colors, red, yellow and blue, plus white. It’s amazing what you can do with only those 4 pigments.
