How to Stretch Your Limited Palette with Jordan Wolfson

If you love the idea of a limited palette, but find it a bit too… limiting, Jordan Wolfson, Ep.95, can show you how to add a little spin.

Wolfson loves working with a limited palette and for a long time approached his colors with a standard cadmium yellow medium, cadmium red light, ultramarine blue and white.

He calls this his standard constellation of color.

But he wouldn’t necessarily keep with just those colors. He would add to that standard constellation based on what he was painting and what he wanted to explore.

For example, he might decide to stretch his yellows.

He’d keep Cadmium Yellow Medium on his palette and bring in additional yellows. That might be cadmium yellow light and Indian Yellow. This would give him a starting point of yellows that were warm, cool, light, dark and transparent. He could now play with all these attributes in yellow with his other basic pigments.

Put it to Practice:

If you're struggling with mixing color but the idea of limiting yourself to just three colors seems really unappealing, try Wolfson's approach.

Choose a standard constellation of colors that includes one yellow, one blue and one red plus white (skip white if you're a watercolorist.)

Now practice with those three colors to get a sense of them. Pick a number like, "I'll work through 10 paintings with just this palette."

Once you have a little familiarity with it as a starting point, pick one color at a time and open up a few more pigments from that color family. Do a few more paintings. Then go back to your original constellation of colors and pick another primary to expand.

This expansion and contraction will give you two main things.

First, by having a set of standard go-to colors you will really learn how they work. This gives you a solid foundation and by having that solid foundation, enables you to learn new colors faster.

Second, you’ll open up new ideas for exploration when you add in those new colors.

It’ll keep you excited about color while also lowering overwhelm. Because anytime you start to feel overwhelmed, you can get back to your original constellation.