Hello my loves and welcome back to my sketchbook. I hope for the next
peaceful five-minutes you can find some inspo to draw more, or work on improving your art,
or use your sketchbook as somewhere to express yourself freely and record special memories.
Today, I’m trying another limited palette experiment. I decided to paint a beachy scene
and a deer to really test these colours in the kind of work I'd like to be making with them.
I’m using Holbein and Daler-Rowney gouache in this handmade sketchbook from Sketchbook Co.
And as always, links to everything mentioned will be in the video description along with
a link to a whole playlist of my sketchbook videos if you’re looking for any more ideas.
After my first time trying the Zorn palette which is Yellow Ochre,
Cadmium Red, and Ivory Black, I said in that video that I liked the warm and muted tones it gave me,
but I was really missing blue in my landscape paintings. I also wasn’t
a huge fan of how the black dulled down skin-tones in my most recent sketchbook
video. So I wanted to shift things round a bit and try my own combination of colours.
To come up with the palette, I started with limited palettes I’d already used and tried
to figure out where they were falling short for me and what I could do to improve on that for
my specific needs. So from looking at the lack of blue in the Zorn palette, I started thinking
of swapping it for Prussian Blue which would create something like another palette I use
quite regularly of Prussian Blue, Alizarin Crimson and Yellow Ochre. The issue I have there is that
it actually ends up quite saturated and I want to see if I can naturally achieve a more muted look,
so instead, I decided I’d switch out the black for Payne’s Grey which is closer to black but has a
much cooler undertone. The red I use is also quite bright when it comes to mixing pinks and things so
I switched that out for a brown- for this time, I thought I’d start with Burnt Sienna
since it’s still quite red, just less vibrant, and it should mix well with the other colours.
Then, I love Yellow Ochre, I just got a fresh tube of it because I get through it almost as quickly
as I get through white, but it just wasn’t working when I wanted to mix nice greens. My favourite
greens are mixed with a bright yellow and black, so with Payne’s Grey as my Black, I decided to
substitute in Cadmium Yellow and see how that went. Letting go of Yellow Ochre was tough though.
As I said, it’s all an experiment, I wasn’t sure if any of these colours
would work together, if it would end up getting muddy or if I would be able to make
the colours I needed with them. I just went into this thinking of it as a starting point
and if I needed to make some more changes, I could figure that out as I went.
And I have a few reasons for wanting a limited palette in the first place. Above anything,
using the same few colours across all your work just easily creates a seamless and
cohesive look. And on a practical level, it makes mixing and re-mixing colours really simple,
it creates a portable set-up for you so- even though we’re not really going out at the moment-
even just in the studio, I can get myself set up for a painting really quickly knowing exactly what
I’m going for every time. It just simplifies things for me in a way that I really like,
and there’s flexibility to build on that basic foundation whenever
I need to if I want a specific colour in there for any particular painting.
So with my colours picked out, I didn’t really bother with swatches like last time. But I
thought I’d learn more about the capabilities of these colours by putting them to the test
in an actual painting, which is what you’re seeing now.
These colours worked really well together.
The Payne’s Grey was a great substitute for both black and blue. If anything, I found that
the colours were still quite vibrant- rather than giving the more muted look I was after. I
might have to think about swapping out the Burnt Sienna next. But overall I really liked what I was
able to do with this palette of colours and I especially liked how the deer turned out.
Along the way, I was reminded just how fun it is to experiment… to come with an
idea or to identify a problem and then to go in search of a solution. I really
like using my sketchbook as a sort of log of all the trials and errors, to really capture
the journey to finding my creative voice. It’s all a bit of an adventure if you want it to be.
If you want to see if a limited palette would work for you, or if you just want
to test yourself with it a bit, I’ll leave a link below to a blog post that goes through a
few combinations you might like. I’d love to know what colours you pick out and how it goes for you.
Otherwise, thanks for joining me for this sketchbook session. I hope you feel inspired
to do a little something creative today as well. And I'll see you next week for the next one. Bye!