“You can mix all the colours you need from just three primary colours, plus white.”
You’ve heard this, right?
You’ve seen the colour wheel, a thousand times, with the primaries, the secondaries, the tertiaries and whatever-aries.
This is the first of two posts I’m doing on this “primary” palette – firstly, seeing what range of colours you can mix with it (and especially what you can’t mix with it) and secondly, in the next post I’m actually going to attempt to paint with it.
I’m doing this because I know a lot of people still believe that you can mix everything you need from primaries. If this is you, I hope that I can save you untold hours of frustration by showing exactly how limited this palette is and why it will hold you back.
And yes, I do believe there is a better way.
I frequently hear from people who tell me they have trouble matching the colours they see. A lot of the time, it’s because they simply can’t do it with the tube paints they have.
So lets start at the beginning.
What is the Primary Palette?
Well, it’s red, blue and yellow. With white. That’s what I was taught at school, anyway. You probably were too.
But which red, blue and yellow?
Most people seem to agree that ultramarine blue and cadmium yellow are the most useful blue and yellow to have as “primaries”.
But if you add something like a cadmium red, you’ll really struggle to make anything in the purple range that doesn’t come out as mud.
So, often, the cad red is changed for something more on the blue-red side.
That does indeed give you a wider gamut. What do I mean by gamut? It’s the range of colours you can produce with those tube paints.
Gamut is extremely important when it comes to tube paint choices. You may decide to limit your choices, as a lot of people do, in order to keep you from producing horrible colour.
And that’s fine as far as it goes. But it’s a bit like limiting yourself to only three ingredients when you cook to make sure you don’t make anything horrible.
Frankly, I don’t think that’s going to make bad work good, or a badly cooked dish tasty. You could struggle on, trying to make something nice with these three ingredients.
Or you could, you know, learn how to cook.
But having heated discussions about crackpot colour theories is much more fun than actually putting in the work to learn how to mix it. How boring would that be?
Which red?
Let’s talk about reds for a second, because it’s the most problematic colour in the “primary” palette.
Frankly, if you have alizarin (pigment PR83) on your palette these days you really need to do some reading up. It is not lightfast. It will fade to brown. After a while, your painting will not look the same as it did when you painted it.
Just don’t. There are plenty of substitutes with better lightfastness you can use.
The most popular version of the primary palette I’ve come across, the one people mention to me over email most often, is recommended by Mark Carder of Geneva paints.
(Just to be clear, I have a huge amount of respect for Mark’s approach and his teaching and all the free material he puts out. In many ways our approaches to teaching are similar. I just disagree about limited palettes being useful).
Mark uses Pyrrole Rubine (PR264) for the red. It’s a lightfast, very intense naphthol red. More orange than alizarin, more purple than cad red.
Another choice might be Quinacridone Rose. It’s lightfastness is excellent and its chroma is higher – at least in the ones I have. It makes higher chroma reds and oranges when mixed with cad yellow, and also since it’s further round the hue wheel toward blue, it makes a better range of purples with ultramarine.
So a representative primary palette might look like this:
- Alizarin/Pyrrole Rubine/Quinacridone Rose (but don’t use Alizarin, ok?)
- Ultramarine blue
- Cadmium yellow
- Titanium white
What I’m interested in testing here is the assertion that you can mix any colour you need with just these colours.
What’s missing here?
With this palette, you’re going to struggle with some areas of the colour space.
Especially, you’re going to struggle to get a good level chroma in some hues.
Chroma is best thought of as the intensity of the colour. Near to grey is very low chroma. Very intense colour is high chroma.
The problem areas here will be:
- Green. All greens will be difficult, but especially at low values. Dark green leaves? Forget it.
- Mid red and orange reds, and oranges. You can make reasonably high chroma oranges, but if you’re painting a clementine? Not quite there.
- Green-blue, especially at mid to light values.
- Browns. A lot of stuff in the world is brown. And brown is just low chroma, usually low value orange. Can you mix good browns with this set of tube paints? Let’s find out 🙂
The test
I used the Munsell book of colour to test the extent of the colours you can mix with this palette.
The great thing about using Munsell is that it’s a map to the colour space. It can show us exactly how far we can travel in any given direction, and where we have to stop. Anything that’s beyond that point, we can’t reach with these tube paints.
Here, watch this video:
What primary palette?
The thing is, there is no such thing as a primary colour in paint. You simply can’t get them. Paint is not light, and no paint can be considered pure enough to function as a true primary.
And that’s really why the primary palette doesn’t let you mix any colour you need. The theory just doesn’t translate into practice.
What I think will help you more is to learn what you can and can’t mix with what you have. Put some hours in on the palette, away from attempting to actually paint pictures, and really find the limits of your tube paints.
Because what really matters is not the tube paints you have. It’s the colours you can mix with them, and how well you can do it.
If you understand the first, and can make a good fist of the second, you’ll have solved most of the struggles most people have with colour.
Colour doesn’t have to be as difficult as a lot of people seem to want to make it. If you must use a palette this limited that’s up to you but please, don’t make life any harder for yourself than it needs to be.
Making good paintings is difficult enough as it is!
Best wishes and thanks for reading,
Paul
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In addition to red, yellow, blue, and white, Mark Carder includes black and brown in his basic palette. He also points out that you can’t get really intense colors with this palette and will have to add others to get those intense ones.
Hi Paul.
I too find Mark Carder good on certain things but not on others. I think limited palettes are useful however but i add raw umber to the equation. Only because it lowers the chroma and value nicely. Raising chroma rarely applies to me in landscapes as i work more with greys.
Cheers Peter.
Hi Paul. Thanks for your posts and insights… they are always a joy and I always gain so much from them. I’ve been particularly interested in this next serious of palett experiments you are embarking on and, as one of those who does subscribe to the limited palett concept, I have a couple of comments about this post in particular.
I am primarily a watercolorist, learned that first, then oil, and one of the first things I learned was the amount of granularity that a watercolor paint has makes a difference. Some, like me, appreciate the effects that granularity brings, others don’t, that’s a personal style choice. But granularity is a direct result of how transparent the paint is. Just like watercolors, oil paints (as you know) have three levels of transparency, “transparent”, “semi-transparent”, and “opaque”. I believe you have to include this in your factors for how this will affect the end result, and if you want the best result in mixing a wide range of colors with a very limited pallet, from my experience, you have to use as transparent a paint as possible, even in oil. The level of opaqueness will alter the color, and in oil, you’re adding white to boot. For these reasons I would not choose a Cadmium paint as they are opaque in nature, I use Hansa Yellow Medium (PY74) which is semi-transparent and admittedly a warmer yellow than cooler… but more about that in a second.
The reds suggested in the post are all cool reds, very cool reds though a good level of transparency; except possibly for Mark Carder’s Pyrrole Rubine which I have not purchased and tried yet. As you mentioned in the post, I have found it’s hard to find a good “true” red that is semi or fully transparent, especially in oil. I like Napthol Red (PR112), which is semi-transparent.
All this said I agree with you completely, I think you’d be hard pressed to come up with a true primary pallet in oils. I think you can get much closer in watercolors, I have though still not exactly. What works for me so far in both mediums, especially oils, is a warm/cool primary pallet (though admittedly I do have a couple of extra blues for “special” mix’ns. I have also discovered, with oils, that I get best results when mixing the hue and chroma first (without white if possible) and then working on the value. Just my $0.02 (USD) 🙂
BTW, this is an interesting website on color to share: artiscreation dot com.
Paul, I always thoroughly enjoy your posts. Thanks for taking the time to do this experiment.
Thank you Paul for adding to my knowledge on colour. It is important to know the range of hue and chroma that is achievable with the pigments we use . Thank you.
Which blue? Ultramarine blue is a blue-purple, not blue. It has red already in it, so attempts to make a high chroma green will fail. Try a cyan instead and see how it goes. Thank you.
Paul,
I’m a painter , notice not an artist, yet! I’m working on it. I’ve found your posts, articles and e pediments so enlightening. I just wanted to thank you. I look forward to learning more.
Yours,
Elaine
Thank you Elaine!
First of all, Im no a fan of Mark Carder art however he is truely a master of color mixing. He can “mix any color in the (real) wolrd” with his limited palette because:
(A) He’s actually got a 5-color palette, not 4 like the artist in the video
(B) His approach is to get the right value first and then adjust the color while this guy was just jumping back and forth, from hue to color, trying to do both at the same time.
Besides, Mark stated it multiple times you might need additional pigment tubes to reach some extremely saturated colors.
Bottom line, Im not convinced.
You don’t need to be convinced by anything I write. What I want you to do is test it for yourself, then you’re in a position to make up your own mind based on your own knowledge and experience, not somebody else’s.
Please, find your own answers on your own palette. You don’t need to take anybody’s word for anything.
Also now Mark’s paint brand, Geneva, has three more colors, Pthalo Blue, Cadmium Red Scarlet, and Manganese Purple in order to get intense colors that he’s always said can not be attained with his original limited palette.
Yes that would certainly extend the range quite a bit.
I’m interested in why you call Pyrrole Rubine a Napthol red. I always thought Pyrrole pigments were more opaque and lightfast than Napthol. Is there a relationship I’m not aware of?
Thank you for your comments. I have been painting for (too) many years and discovered Geneva Paints only last year (2019). I simply LOVE those paints and also the limited palette technique – even if sometimes additional colors can be used (It is my lazy side). I find the limited palette a lot easier to use than the eleven or so colors I used to use.