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I love to experiment with limited palettes.  It feels like magic to take three primary colors and mix them together to create a rainbow of color harmony.  One of my favorites is the "Zorn" palette, from Swedish artist Anders Zorn.  He used yellow, red, black and white, to represent the primary colors. I have read different accounts of what the the exact pigments were but it is agreed they were dull.  No screaming vibrant colors to steal the scene.  The combination of dull colors are what I call an "ish" palette.  This means that the resulting paintings will not be brilliant in color, but be represented by red-ish, yellow-ish, and blue-ish tones. If you trust this and use the simple equation of primary + primary =secondary, and mix as you would with any limited palette you will end up with a subtle color harmony that is rich and nuanced.

A self portrait by Anders Zorn, showing his "ish" palette

Below is a demo of a recent painting using the "ish" palette.

Here is what to keep in mind to make a limited palette work for you.

1.To create a full spectrum of colors you need the three primaries, red, yellow, and blue.  I chose yellow ocher, venetian red, ivory black and titanium white serve as my blue. 

2.You need to know your palettes value extremes how light you can go and how dark you can go.  Again, black and white are my value extremes.

3.You need to know how saturated or bright you can go.  With this particular palette I will never mix a brilliant purple, but when I mix red, black and a touch of white I will get a convincing purple when compared to the other colors on the palette

4.Once you set the parameters of value and saturation, mark them on your painting then make every decision within those parameters.

  Here is the palette, ivory black, yellow ocher, and venetian red.  I added a touch of cadmium red medium into the hat at the end to give it a pop of color.

The light source was cool, so I blocked in the painting using a wash of venetian red and yellow ocher.  I plan to leave parts of the warm under-painting showing through the shadow areas of the finished work.

Here I mark the extremes of value and saturation.  The white of the scarf is as light as I will go, under the hat is as dark as I will go and the front of the red hat is the most saturated color.  Once this is in I can begin to build the painting by comparing all my decisions to these.

I construct the painting like a jigsaw puzzle seeing how the colors and values fit together.

The background is in and I check the composition by placing it in a frame.  The hands have not been painted yet and the warm under-painting makes them glow compared to the surrounding cool tones.

The painting is blocked in and I can begin to see what it will look like.  I had to stop for a while to teach a workshop, and was not sure I liked the brush work on the coat so I scraped it with a palette knife. When I resumed painting I spent alot of time on the transitional areas of light to dark.

  Close up of the hands in the finished painting. 

Close up of the finished painting.  I spend a lot of time working edges and sculpting the form.  At the end  I mixed a tiny bit of cadmium red medium into the venetian red to make the front of the hat brighter.

  The final painting, "Departure" 30x20 oil