Experimenting with Limited Colour Palettes

Limited colour palettes are there to help you control colours with purpose. With less choice comes less confusion (until you have to work out how to make blue without a blue paint). This is why I am working out the Zorn limited colour palette: it relies on ivory black, titanium white, vermillion and yellow ochre. In having strong warmer saturation it becomes perfect for skin tones... it's not the best for nature but I have a lot of learning ahead of me. I was inspired by an artist on instagram discussing using grey in skin to draw attention to the more interesting colour use of the piece. 

For my experiment, I thought it best to stick to a subject fitting with the colour palette, and who was better than Edith Cushing from Crimson Peak. To fully grasp the colour theory I would like to do two pieces - one warm and one cool. This is the warmer one. Here, I found yellow extraordinarily difficult to appear as yellow as it was also trying to be every other colour. The blonde hair was the most difficult step and I'm still not entirely happy with it - or the hat for that matter. Working with the skin should have been the easy bit since that was what the colour palette was made for, and yet it was a struggle, since it was harder to create the right colour undertones as well as the darkness (the black cools the colours). Out of everything, the background ended up being the easiest bit! Even with the colour palette not really suiting the greens of nature. Overall, it produces something relatively convincing that I can be proud of... as long as I don't think about how other people can ustilise the colours. It really is a matter about purposeful brushstrokes, maybe I have to do exercises with the least amount of strokes to get a better readable piece.

After this I plan to do a cooler version, with the focus of getting as many colours out of black paint. Not only will it be cooler, it would be paler, so that I can also experiment with the white. Though it appears this is not happening for a while so stay tuned!