The Palette

The Palette, and it's organization

This post probably contains far more thoughts on palette/color layout than most people would ever want. The key takeaway is that consistency in color arrangement on your palette can help with your painting efficiency. Find some way that you like to put out your colors, and stick to that (more or less).

And while I am in the world of oil paint in this post, color/palette organization applies just as well to acrylic and other media.

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The word "palette" can mean a few different things in the context of art & painting.

For the purposes of this blog entry, I refer to the surface you lay your colors out on. That might be a sheet of palette paper, a classic wooden palette, or a glass palette.

The other meanings for "palette" I most often encounter are these:

• the specific tube colors you lay out  ~  As in saying I'm painting with the Zorn palette. That would mean you'd be using that specific set of colors/tubes to paint with.)

• the colors that appear in a picture  ~   As in someone saying "I love the palette of greens and oranges in that painting." That might have little to do with the tube colors the artist actually employed, as greens and oranges are secondaries and could be mixed from primaries. Also, an artist will oftentimes put out a number of colors, but only really use a small subset of them in the painting.

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This bit of writing delves into laying out your colors in an organized way and some different ways to do it. Being haphazard with how you lay out colors can only hinder the efficiency of your painting experience. If you put the same colors in the same places (for the most part), you can work a little faster when you need to grab a bit of a certain color for a mixture. It can become a little less of something to hunt for, and more a muscle memory type of thing.

As you can see from some of the images from paintings I have included, these painters are using wooden palettes, which some folks still use. Their arrangement of pigments appears to be white (nearest the thumb) to yellows, reds, and on to darker colors as you move further out. Overall, an arrangement of light to dark. Also, white is frequently the most used pigment so it's often placed in a prominent place. And in the image below, you can see that a larger amount of white is put on the palette, which is common.

The organization of light to dark works pretty well for many artists.

One thing to think of however you might lay out your colors, is to allow space around each blob of paint, so when you go to stick your brush or palette knife into one, you don't accidentally pick up a little of the neighboring color. This can really mess up a mixture if the color you accidentally grab a little of has a high tinting strength.

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Above is my palette right before I embarked on a painting.

I lined up the tubes I used with where those colors are on the palette so I can quickly replenish one if I run out of color.

My medium is a gel-type one. If an artist uses linseed oil or something runnier, they'd need to have it in a little cup, or it would spread out into a large pool.

The layout above is more or less like this diagram I drew:

Another way to do it, but keeping cool and warm colors apart in an "L" shaped arrangement:

And yet another.

I had a student once who used a lot of colors and she had them like this, or maybe even on all 4 sides of her palette.

Some colors are harder than others to classify with the basic hue names. Burnt Sienna is as much a red to my mind as it is a brown. Is Payne's Grey a grey or a blue? Up to you, really in terms of how you arrange stuff.

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John Carlson's arrangement from his excellent book "Carlson's Guide to Landscape Painting:"

(the thing sticking out at the upper right is a container of medium that clips on)

James Gurney's layout from his excellent book "Color & Light:"

(you can see how he has mixed tints from some of them)

The palette I use for oils at home is a glass one.

It's just a piece of tempered glass that I got out of a cheap frame. Under it I have a piece of grey palette paper, so I am mixing colors against that mid-value, which some artists think makes judging values easier.

Glass palettes are very easy to clean up when paint eventually dries on it. I use a razor scraper and it cleans up very well with that. I also like how smooth it is and how a palette knife feels moving over it.

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If you're interested in the specific tube colors different artists use(d), this makes for interesting reading:

"Oil Color Palettes".  https://oilcolorpalettes.blogspot.com/

This blog/website lists the colors used by various artists, contemporary ones and masters of the past.