Flesh TONES
To improve the accuracy of your portraits, Raw Umber Studios tutor LIZET DINGEMANS explains the importance of the limited palette and sets an exercise to try
There are tremendous amounts of pigments and materials available to artists these days. While Rembrandt was largely restricted to an earth palette, vivid blues, reds and yellows are the norm for artists working today. Tales of importing precious lapis lazuli by caravan across the desert are from a different era. However, this abundance of options can get overwhelming sometimes and it can actually make it harder to put down a strong composition on the canvas.
Using a limited palette can help with this. Many artists throughout the ages have made use of a reduced selection of colour. Sometimes this was imposed on the artist – Rembrandt simply did not have access to the bright colours we have today. For others, this was a selfimposed limitation in order to enhance their creative interpretation of flesh, from the Swedish painter Anders Zorn who experimented with just three colours plus white, to modern illustrators like Phil Hale, who uses a greatly reduced palette in many of his paintings.
In this article, I will explain the advantages of limiting your colours and demonstrate the usefulness of a restricted palette for mixing skin tones with a portrait project that will use only three colours plus white.
Before I get into the limited palette, I want to talk about the colour wheel. Most of us will be familiar with the colour wheel and we are taught that the primary colours are red, blue and yellow. When mixed together, these make the secondary colours – green, orange, and purple (or violet). A limited palette using just the primary colours is sometimes referred to as the RYB palette (Red, Yellow, Blue) and we are taught that these three colours can mix every other colour on the spectrum.
Unfortunately, things are not that simple. For instance, it’s impossible to create a hot pink or a very bright green using just those three primaries, so people have been looking for a ‘better’ set of three primaries.
A different system is composed of cyan, magenta and yellow – or CMY. The term CMYK is popular in printing, as many printers use cyan, magenta and yellow ink, along with a black toner, which is the K – the K stands for “key”, the key printing plate that holds the detail in an image.
When you compare the CMY and RYB palettes, mixing cyan, magenta, and yellow pigments together can make an even bigger and brighter range of colours than the traditional primary colours. This is why it is often used in printing. Of course, the CMY palette still has its limitations – it has less range in the oranges, for example, compared with the other palettes – so it is best to pick the colours most suited to each painting.
When painting skin tones, the palette favoured by Anders Zorn is popular – a white, a black, Yellow Ochre and Vermillion (or Cadmium Red) – because it leans towards the warmer oranges, though the greens and pinks that can be created with it are very dull.
COLOUR GAMUT
The colour gamut is the set of possible hues that you can mix using your chosen palette. It can influence the mood and perception of an artwork. For instance, look at the difference between these two John Singer Sargent portraits. Compare the difference in the colour gamut and atmosphere. In the left image we can see a cool, complementary colour gamut – the blues and greys contrast with the pinks in the skin and dress. The right image is much more monochromatic – both the skin and background are made up of shades of red.