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Setting up your Oil Painting Palette
by Dik F. Liu
Oil painters often ask me how should they set up their palette. To an oil painter, a palette could mean two things. It could mean the choice of tubed colors to use, or a physical surface on which to place these tubed colors and to mix them into other colors.
First, let us examine that physical surface for mixing colors. Many painters use handheld palettes, the kind with a thumbhole. Handheld palettes are apt for painting outdoors and for painting a portrait in the client's home. When you haven't the service of a table to rest your palette, a handheld palette will suffice. Back in your studio, only a large palette resting on a sturdy table will do. A good choice for a palette is a rectangular piece of glass. You can buy one in an art supply store. Cheaper still is to buy a glass cutting board -- the kind used on the kitchen counter, readily available at Kmart and other discount stores. The glass must be smooth, preferably tempered, and at least 14" x 18". Do not settle for a smaller size. The larger your palette, the cleaner your colors. Does this sound incredible? Alternate between a small palette and a larger one, and you will know that I am right.
Before you use the glass for a palette, use household enamel paint to paint the bottom side of the palette into a middle gray. A common name for a middle gray color in enamel is Battleship gray. You will find that your colors mixed on a gray palette are more accurate than colors mixed on a white palette. That's because on a white palette, all of your colors will look darker than they are.
Now that you have a perfect surface to mix your paint, let's come to the second meaning of the palette. That is, what choice of tubed colors should you put on it, and where to place these colors?
There are three important rules for setting up your tubed colors on the glass. I have never seen a traditional painter worth his salt who ignores these three rules:
- Place your tubed colors so that they always align vertically on the outer edge of your palette, so that they are as far from you as possible. This means that if you are right-handed, put the palette on your right side and squeeze out the tubed colors on the right side of the palette, in a vertical column. That is because if you scatter your tubed colors throughout the palette, you will have less space for mixing the your colors. Consequently, your color mixtures with become dirty. It is important to place the colors on the outer edge of the palette. If you place the tubed colors in the inner edge of the palette, thus placing them in a vertical column closer to you, you will habitually mix all your colors in the part of the palette that is closer to you. You will be using only half a palette. Don't ask me why that is. I don't know. The mind works mysteriously.
- Arrange your color on your palette according to a light and dark scale, placing lighter colors in front and darker colors in the back, so your white is in the front and your black in the back. Then, always place the same color in the same place. In the heat of the painting battle, you automatically reach for a certain spot of your palette for a certain color. If that color is not there, you will lose your current of thought. Worse, if you have to keep searching for different colors in your palette, you will never move into that mental zone wherein you can mix colors instinctively. Imagine if you are learning to type, and every time you return to the keyboard, the keys are placed differently. You will struggle just to find the key, let alone write poetry.
- Once you have decided on your basic choice of tubed colors, have those tubed colors squeezed out in your palette before your paint. This includes colors that you don't plan on using. For example, do not exclude red in your palette just because you don't plan on having red in your painting. While you paint, you might find that you need red to make that yellow more orange. You might need red to mix that violet. You might need red to dull that green. You might need red to warm that shadow side of the cheek. You might -- you will -- need red. And if you don't have red, you will reach for another color as a substitute. Art is not served when red is needed, and sienna used instead.
Now we know what to do with the tubed colors, so which colors should we choose?
It is important to set your palette -- to select your tubed colors -- so that they co-exist in your palette in an ecological balance. It means having all the needed colors and to have them in similar strength. It also means eliminating extraneous colors. The goal is to have a palette containing the fewest possible colors, but a palette that can mix most of the other colors you need. You will learn more about color logic using a limited palette than you would with a full range palette. The more laconic your palette, the better. A palette should have no extra color, as a machine no extra part.
A forewarning: the palettes in this article are carefully balanced. Unless you know what you are doing, do not substitute any of the colors. For example, Zinc White is not the same as Titanium White. Squeezed from the tubes and laying side by side, they look similar, but when used they have radically different tinting strength and opacity.
A favorite limited palette from yesteryear is comprised of the following colors from top to bottom - Titanium White, Cadmium Yellow Light, Cadmium Orange, Alizarin Crimson, Ultramarine Blue, and Ivory Black. This palette is only limited in the colors required. It is unbound in its capacity to yield the colors you need to mix. Using this palette, you can mix hues brighter than those of Titian's, Veronese's, Velasquez's, and Rembrandt's. These great colorists painted their masterpieces using far duller colors than the Technicolor that modern technology has afforded us lesser mortals. Consider the purple we can mix with that limited palette. You might think that purple dull, but it is more intense than any purple that you will find in a Rembrandt. How Rembrandt would leer over our palettes and marvel at our Cadmium Orange. He hadn't any orange that intense, not by a long shot.
Look at my web site (members.aol.com/dikfliu). Most of my earlier paintings are painted with this limited palette.
With the new colors that recent technology brought us, an updated version of this limited palette would be comprised of, from top to bottom: Titanium White, Hansa Yellow, Quinacridone Red, Cobalt Blue, and Ivory Black. Contrasting with that other limited palette, with this updated palette you can mix brighter greens and much brighter violets. Here is a palette that would set Rembrandt's head spinning. But, before you get too excited, know that this palette is harder to use. It is newer, but not better. The Quinacridone Red here is too transparent, the Hansa Yellow too weak, and the entire palette lacks the ecological balance of that other limited palette. So, you sacrifice some ease, but you gain a palette that, once you have mastered it, can mix every color imaginable.
Compared to a limited palette, a full spectrum palette is more convenient. A full spectrum palette doesn't always yield more mixed colors. You should refrain from using one until you have mastered using a limited palette. This takes years. A limited palette forces you to learn the logic and shortcuts of color mixing. If you insist on using a full spectrum palette, here is one that I use: Titanium White, Hansa Yellow, Cadmium Orange, Quinacridone Red, Alizarin Crimson, Dioxazine Purple, Ultramarine Blue, Thalo Blue, a middle green such as Rowney Permanent Light Green or the one made by Mermeri, and Ivory Black.
There are some painters who don't use black because of the misguided notion that the Impressionists expelled black from their palette. It is true, as these painters insist, that using other colors you can mix an interesting black. But, you can never mix a color that behaves like black. The Impressionists learned this. In their later years, many Impressionists returned to using black. When Cezanne died, they found six types of black paint in his studio. Renoir, who abandoned black adhering to the Impressionist dogma, later learned that he could not paint without black. He called black the "Queen of all colors."
Use black, and prosper.
Dik F. Liu is an artist and a teacher in NYC. He has shown his work nationwide, and he teaches at Long Island University, Parsons School of Design, and The School of Visual Arts.