Learning To Use Color is Much Easier When You Do This! 5 Benefits to Limited Color Schemes.

I LOVE the bible verses at the end of your videos. I have been told that many times by fellow artists to limit my pallet. However I did not listen and bought tons of different colors. As a consequence….I sometimes have difficulty mixing a color I want. I do have my favorites though and am getting pretty good at knowing them. Good advice. Thank you

And all of a sudden- rocks! Love the colors used!

Wow! I am amazed at your ability to make the rocks and the forest look 3-d. Your negative painting is exceptional. You really made the rocks and the trees pop off the page. Thank you.

I love watching you paint, I get engrossed in the color and marks wondering what you are doing, the there is a beautiful painting 💜

Thank you for a really stunning demo. Limited colours are always a bonus. Like you mentioned, too many colours make mud. I learned from a wonderful South African artist, Louis Audie. He was a chemist and mixed a lot of the Winsor & Newton colours when he worked for them many years ago. He taught me to use just 6 colours - plus white for oils, plus water for watercolours.

Thank you, Steve. I am going to select six colors to paint with today!

You mentioned thumbnails. So important. It doesn't take much space to see the "What happens if I do this?" thing. Then, just as you did here, if you get one that catches your eye you can reference it and hopefully recall how you got what you did in the first place. In the end it's actually throwing color on the paper and experimenting with things while not worrying if you're burning a little paper is what will teach. Now to practice that myself and throw more paint down! Always dig your spontaneous work. So fun to see them just almost magically turn from blobs of color into stands of trees or piles of rocks. Thanks a ton!

Beautifully painted. And great advice.

Great explanation. So soothing watching a painting appear to your mellow voice accompaniment.

Nice painting Steve and a wonderful topic. We are all guilty of adding this color and that color to our pallets until we get ourselves thinking more about colors than values and composition. A great reminder that we all need to step it back on the colors sometimes and make things simple. It s amazing how much you can learn by limiting your colors. Hope you and your family had a great 4th!

Hi, Steve. I'm really happy that you've done this video on limited colour choices, and explained it so succintly. Thank you! I've always appreciated the fact that you usually use just a few, and that has made me feel less isolated in an ArtTube world where for the majority, it seems, convenience colours are an absolute necessity because "I don't have time to mess about mixing colours." and huge palettes with 48 or more colours is a norm. I'm really sad, because I feel that they are missing out on so much fun, so much excitement so much satifaction, from playing the "What if..." game, and so much they could then pass on with enthusiasm and knowledge, to help others.... (especially if they played the 'What if...' game on camera!) Since my beginning with focussing on watercolour, (that's 28 years ago), I've only had 12 colours in my box, all used, but rarely more than six at most at any one time. I've never needed anything else. I've painted landscape, seascape, people, places, still life... in the UK and many places overseas, all with just 12 colours. I've taught students with the same set of 12, who've looked at me as though I were crazy at first, but as soon as they began to mix, they almost all got really excited! A minimum number of colours with 12, mixed one by one of the others, is 144, and in truth, the possibilities are infinite. Entered in medieval French architecture! When I moved here, with landscape painting at quite a distance and a vastly decreased budget for things like fuel for the car, plein air was limited to drawing random people from life (free, unsuspecting life models!) and urban sketching. Lots of variety there, from medieval to modern, and I'd done quite a bit in the Uk, obviously, but suddenly I came unstuck, colour-wise, and lost confidence. It was very disconcerting! But eventually, I discovered (thanks to an ArtTube friend!) that Titanium Buff, in very small (pinhead) amounts can work really well. (I'd broken the habit of a painting lifetime and tried Titanium White in various mixes, but still couldn't quite get what I needed). On its own, Tianium Buff works where that colour's needed, but normally, it's to mix with one or another colour to get the oddly-tinted and very opaque pastel shades of the architecture. I'm still learning to use it, still not really understanding why I can't get 'it' with the colours I already have, but I believe that we never finish learning - there's always something new to surprise me, even after mixing colours for years! I am getting the hang of it - slowly, but getting there. I have a play palette of all sorts of oddments (30 in total) which I've picked up across those years, mostly as freebies / free samples, which have languished in the paint storage box till I moved here. Being confined to home at times due to health issues influenced getting them out to play (though I had to buy a larger paint box...), and I'm glad that I did. I have a great deal of fun 'just playing' (eg blobs are fun - blobs of paint allowed to run and mix on the paper, blobs of colour to see what I can 'see' in them and drawing that into them - the 'What if...' game again!) But in the end, my 'workhorse' paint box is still 12 colours + Titanium Buff. 😄

I have my personal faves in my 8 colour mini palette. (When I say mini, i mean mini: 5,5x2,8x1,8cm or roughly 2 x 0,8 x 0,4 inches and it unfolds like a book and half of it is a mixiing palette and on top is something to clip onto the sketchbook.) I have space for 8 colours and I thought I would use it only for travels. 😂 No, I don't. It's pretty much my exclusive palette now. I can do everything with it! EVERYTHING! (For my purposes it's btw: Yellow, Magenta, Cyan, a black replacement, a nice default green for basic foliage, a nice purple I like to do shadows with and a dark brown that resembles my families hair and a custom mixed skin colour that resembles my families skin tone. And I can mix every skin tone with that. Easy. But for myself I paint mostly my family. Sometimes I miss a nice red, but I can mix it and I can also use the HUGE collection I have :D)

And now we have beautiful color harmony! Very inspiring! Thank you Steve.

Wow I love 💕 the color palette 🎨 choices you have. This is such a wonderful piece of landscape artwork that you made. I’m always so inspired by what you do & share with us. Thanks so much.

That definitely helps. Thank you so much. ❤️

I think it's not necessarily a problem to have a palette of 24 or 48 colors. The important thing is to select a limited number of colors according to the subject of the moment. Thank you for this video and for the sublime landscape!

I'm always amazed to see a gorgeous painting appearing out of some random brushstrokes ✨ I really like the colours you used

Love the limited palette with this painting!! Thanks for sharing Steve!!

Hullo Steve, I have been enjoying working on an elongated pad of paper I recently purchased an 8x20 pad from Jerry’s and a ROBAX Palette! They make several round plastic palette configurations. I have even purchased the well inserts to allow easy removal and changing of paint colors even brands. Mixing as much as I want! The center has a 3 tiered mixing area and you can even buy an additional well section for more choices! This is in direct opposition to your video, BUT I like having a wide selection of different colors on hand without needing to dig around for a color I know that I have but don’t remember exactly what palette I last put it in! Yes, I keep my travel palettes separate and refill as needed. This ROBAX palette is amazing. I am going to get the lazy susan base so it will spin on the table and make switching colors that much easier. The best part of having the well inserts is that you can place your “limited” palette choices together in one section or switch to a rainbow order so easily. Thank you for sharing this sweet painting video with us.

Nice landscape painting , thanks for sharing