the limited palette and the zorn palette: a full range from few pigments

Mix a full range of colour and value from white, yellow ochre, a red and ivory black, with a study plan drawn from classic manuals and five measured paintings.

8 min read

A limited palette means you set out only a few pigments and get every other colour and value by mixing them. The best-known version is named after the Swedish painter Anders Zorn: a white, yellow ochre, vermilion and ivory black, with cadmium red the usual modern stand-in for the vermilion. Zorn did not keep to it on every canvas, and his landscapes and some portraits use blues and greens, but the four-colour set is what he is remembered for and it is a genuine working palette for heads and figures. It looks too small to paint with, but a narrow set forces you to judge relationships between colours instead of reaching for a tube for each hue. The classic manuals in our library predate Zorn's fame and are written for much larger palettes, so this guide uses them for technique and uses measured paintings to show what restrained mixing looks like in practice.

What you need

Titanium white, the white used in the mixing notes for several of the paintings below.
Yellow ochre, which appears in the palette Solomon sets out and in the mixes for most of the example paintings [1].
One red. Solomon lists light red and vermilion [1]; Zorn used vermilion, and the Sargent and Korovin mixes use cadmium red. Choose one and stay with it.
Ivory black, which Solomon includes [1] and which anchors the darks in the Sargent, Carolus-Duran and Malayan records. Its job in this palette is double: mixed with white it is your grey, and mixed with yellow ochre it is your green.
A palette knife, for mixing and for scraping off a failed first layer [2].
Turpentine and linseed oil. Turpentine alone is preferable for the first painting; later layers can take oil [1].
A few small canvases or panels, and a clean surface to work on [3].
Optional: one earth colour such as burnt umber or raw umber, which the Carolus-Duran and Malayan records use for their darks, and a blue if you intend to paint sky or foliage, which is where the four-colour set runs out.

How a few pigments stay in harmony

Goethe observed that colours mixed together keep their original darkness. The darker the colours you combine, the darker the resulting grey, and the lighter the colours, the lighter the grey [4]. This is why a small palette holds together: every neutral you mix is built from the same few ingredients, so the neutrals are related to one another and to the pure notes.

Chevreul adds a reason to keep your greys deliberate. He found that a grey chosen for its depth of tone shows the effect of neighbouring colours more strongly than black or white does [5]. A grey mixed from your own black and white will therefore make a nearby ochre or red read more vividly than the same ochre or red would on its own [5].

Step by step

Set out the palette in a fixed order: white, yellow ochre, red, black, with plenty of room between the piles for mixing. Keep your brushes and canvas clean. Solomon insists that delicate colour cannot be worked too cleanly [3].
Make your three basic mixtures before you touch the canvas. Mix black into white for a range of greys. Mix black into yellow ochre for a dull olive. Mix black into the red for a dark neutral. Label the mixtures in your head by what they are for: cool light, green, warm dark.
Build a short value scale from your black and white, then place a dab of each ochre and red mixture beside the grey of the same value. This shows you how much of the colour is value and how much is hue. It also lets you check how the grey affects its neighbours [5].
Draw the subject with a thin line and keep any charcoal dust to a minimum. Solomon warns that heavy charcoal black destroys the freshness of colour [3].
Lay in the background thinly, matching the colour and tone of what you see, using turpentine for this first layer [2][1]. Scrape it off with the palette knife if the surface clogs or the study is not working [2].
Mix the middle colour of the main mass next. Solomon calls the middle flesh colour the key to the whole colour scheme, and the same logic applies to the middle tone of any subject you paint [2]. Do not push it toward grey too early, or the purity of the colour suffers [2].
Step away from the canvas for a few minutes, then return and judge the middle colour again. You may find it too pink or too yellow, and a fresh eye makes the false note easier to see [2].
Cover the rest of the canvas by matching the general colours and tones as you would match silks or wools. Then match the coloured shadows, then the higher lights, then the broken passages [3]. With a limited palette, each of these is a mixture of your two or three pigments, so correct by changing the proportions rather than adding a fifth colour.
Check the whole picture by squinting. If one area is too warm or too cool compared with its neighbours, adjust its proportion of red or black and leave the others alone.

Common mistakes

Greying too early. Over-neutralised mixes at the start make the whole study chalky, and the purity of the colour is hard to recover [2].
Judging a colour on its own. A mixture reads differently depending on what surrounds it, so compare it with its neighbours instead of the palette [6].
Adding black until everything is dull. A dark underlayer can lead to a cold blackness throughout, which Solomon names as the main objection to grisaille [7]. Mixed darks that lean warm or cool avoid the problem.
Scumbling light over a dark ground and expecting warmth. Solomon notes that this tends toward coldness and a grey bloom [8]. If you want a warm light, mix it warm to begin with.
Too much oil in the first layer. Oil darkens colour and can leave the surface soapy after a few paintings [1].
Reaching for a new tube to rescue a bad mix. If a passage is wrong, change the proportions of your existing pigments first.
Chasing bright accents the palette cannot make. Keep the saturated notes small and let neutrals carry most of the picture.

Study these paintings

None of these is documented as a Zorn-palette picture, and our library holds no Zorn. The first three come close: they are heads and a street built from black, white, ochre and a red or an earth, which is the palette this guide teaches. The last two bring in a blue, and are here to show what the four-colour set cannot do and where you would add a fifth tube.

frank-omeara-by-john-singer-sargent: the nearest thing here to a Zorn head. The record gives the background and coat as ivory black with a little raw umber, the core flesh as yellow ochre, cadmium red light and burnt sienna, the highlights as white with yellow ochre and cadmium red light, and the shadow side of the face as raw umber and cadmium red light with a touch of white. Squint and the picture is two zones, near-black and light. Every colour in the face is a proportion of the same three warm pigments against a black, which is exactly the exercise in steps 2 and 3.

henri-fantin-latour-by-carolus-duran: the record's palette is ivory black, burnt umber, raw sienna and white, with cadmium red and ultramarine as small secondaries, and its mixing note is to make the browns and greys from umber, black and white and warm or cool them with a touch of red or blue. The approach is direct: the darks washed in thin, the face blocked in mid-tones, highlights added last with thicker paint. Use it to see how far black, an earth and white carry a head before any red is needed.

autumn-day-by-petros-malayan: a black-and-earth palette applied to a street. The darkest notes are ivory black with raw umber and the mid-tones are yellow ochre with umber or burnt sienna. The record points to a small warm accent made from yellow ochre and burnt sienna, which stands out because the surrounding mixes are neutral. Notice that the drama comes from a few intense darks rather than a broad value range.

the-curates-walk-by-cristiano-banti: the darks here come from burnt umber and Prussian blue, used almost undiluted for the deepest accents, while lighter areas add white, raw sienna and yellow ochre. The record notes a restricted, muted range in which the figures read as mid-dark masses against a pale sky and path. The blue is doing what black does in the Sargent; compare the two sets of darks and decide which you prefer.

corner-of-the-province-street-in-pereslavl-by-konstant-n-korovin: the mid-tone ground is yellow ochre, cadmium red and white, and the deepest shadows are ultramarine, burnt umber and sap green. This is a good picture for seeing how a red and an ochre together make weathered wood tones, which the Zorn set can do. The sky and the sap-green shadows are the passages it cannot, and the reason landscape painters usually add a blue.

Sources

The Practice of Oil Painting (Solomon J. Solomon (1910)), CHAPTER XV PAINTING IN COLOUR DIRECT FROM LIFE-
The Practice of Oil Painting (Solomon J. Solomon (1910)), PAINTING IN COLOUR FROM LIFE
The Practice of Oil Painting (Solomon J. Solomon (1910)), STILL LIFE IN COLOUR
Theory of Colours (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
Laws of Contrast of Colour (M. E. Chevreul)
Laws of Contrast of Colour (M. E. Chevreul), INFLUENCE OF A SURROUNDING COLOUR UPON ONE COLOUR WHEN COMPARED WITH
The Practice of Oil Painting (Solomon J. Solomon (1910)), COLOURING A MONOCHROME
The Practice of Oil Painting (Solomon J. Solomon (1910)), COLOURING A MONOCHROME