Master Class: Secondary Color Palette

The Next Storm 6x8 Oil - Available

Scrub Oak 6x8 Oil - Available

Both of the above paintings were made with a limited palette of
Permanent Orange, Dioxazine Purple and Phthalo Green.

As we all know (or should know), a limited palette simplifies color-mixing and makes it easier to achieve color harmony.   When painters want a limited palette, many retreat to the split-primary palette, which consists of a warm and cool version of the primary colors, for a total of six colors.  If a painter wants to simplify life even more, he may choose just  three colors.  Often, these end up being red, yellow and blue.

But there are other possibilities.  What about a palette made up of secondary colors rather than the primaries?

The secondary colors—orange, purple and green—each contain two primaries.  Orange contains yellow and red; purple, red and blue; green, blue and yellow.  It is possible to mix colors akin to the primaries from a secondary color palette.  Orange and purple give you a dull red; purple and green, a dull blue; green and orange, a very dark greenish yellow.  If you start off with rich, modern pigments, you can come up with some very natural-looking mixtures that are perfect for the landscape.

I've done some experimenting with this.  For my palette, I chose the following Gamblin colors:

• Permanent orange (Monoacetelone, PO 62)
• Dioxazine purple (Carbazol dioxazine, PV 23)
• Phthalo green (Chlorinated copper phthalocyanine PG 7)
• Titanitum-zinc white (Titanium dioxide, PW 6, and zinc oxide, PW 4)

I was really pleased with the mixtures I was able to mix.  I mixed "on the fly," that is, without pre-mixing colors.  One might mix versions of the primaries of these in advance—e.g. make a red from the orange and purple—but the quality of the primary varies depending on the proportions of the secondaries.  However, to show you what this looks like, I've mixed some samples below and have arranged them in color wheel-fashion.  (The secondaries sit at the corners of the triangle plus a swatch of the tint; the "primaries" mixed from secondaries, plus a tint, are along the sides of the triangle.)

With today's range of pigments, this idea allows for much experimentation.  It'd be interesting to see how another purple, say, manganese violet, would work rather than dioxazine purple.  (What's the difference between purple and violet?  That's grist for another blog post.)  And what about a split-secondary palette, in which you have a cool and a warm version of orange, purple and green?