Hello my loves and welcome back to my sketchbook. Today I'm sharing the spread you might have seen
in my last vlog, but if you didn't see that, let me catch you up on what this is all about.
I've grown more and more confident with the style of my art this year, but one area where I'm kind
of stuck in my old ways is colour. I naturally end up gravitating towards painting either the true
colour of something, or usually, it comes out as a more bright and bold and colourful interpretation
of what I'm seeing. And that would be all well and good if that were the style I wanted, but I
actually prefer the look of a more muted colour scheme and would like to find a way to introduce
that into my work. Just telling myself to use less saturated versions of colours hasn't really
worked, as I said, I just naturally end up mixing brighter colours, so I thought I'd start trying
out different existing palettes to see what might work for me if I limit the colours I can use.
As the title suggests, today I'm testing out the Zorn palette, as made famous by Anders Zorn. It's
more traditionally used for portraits as you end up with lots of lovely, fleshy, earthy tones,
but I wanted to see how it would do with my usual painting subject matter of plants and landscapes.
The only colours used are Cadmium Red Light, Yellow Ochre and Ivory Black and White.
The cool black, especially when next to the warmer colours acts as a substitute for blue,
but having read up on this palette and looked at the work of Anders Zorn, it
looks like he also used Cobalt Blue in some of his paintings,
and other colours here and there, sometimes just using this limited palette as a base.
So to start with, you saw me swatching all the colours and mixes that can be made from them
in all their different combinations. It was a really useful practice to get to know how to
vary the colours, and how just slight differences in the mixes can have a huge variety of results.
This is my first time doing something like this and it took
over an hour, it was actually pretty difficult,
but I'll leave a link below to a page that explained the process much better than I could.
Towards the end, I had found my stride and figured out the best way to do it and I actually think
this is something I'll do more of in the future as I continue to test different limited palettes.
Once I was done, I decided I'd do a couple of paintings to really push these colours
to their limits. I chose to paint a watermelon and a landscape to see how well I could work
without vivid greens and blues- and it was a really interesting experiment, lots of fun,
and just the kind of thing I love using my sketchbook for- and info on this sketchbook
and the paints I'm using etc. will be linked below as always, by the way.
I love the warm muted tones of these paintings and I can see how this palette would work
so well with portraits, but I do think I need blue- which isn't a huge surprise.
I swapped the black out for Payne's Grey halfway through to see if the even cooler tones of the
grey would make a difference, but I think what I'll try next is keep the Yellow Ochre,
swap that really saturated red for a really saturated blue, and maybe go for a warm brown
to act as both my black and reds. I don't know if that'll work but that's what experiments are for.
I'm actually really surprised at just how much I enjoyed all this
and how eager it's made me to keep experimenting.
If you want a little challenge or just a way to shake up the look of your next painting,
I'd really recommend using a super-limited palette like this one. And I'd 100% recommend trying this
swatching technique- as time-consuming as it might be, it really forces you to focus,
it's quite a mindful practice, and you get to know the colours you're using so much better.
Anyway, I'll let you enjoy the rest of the video. But
I hope today's sketchbook session has inspired you to to a little something creative today,
maybe a bit of experimentation too if you're feeling up for it. Thanks
so much for joining me and I'll see you soon for the next one.
Bye!