A Beginner's Color Palette: Part 2, A Semi-Limited Color Palette

Purchasing the wrong combination of oil colors will make any artist go insane. Here I am going to cover which colors I would encourage a beginner to purchase and why. Below you will see two colors for each primary, a white, a black, and some browns.

A good color palette will do three things: one, provide a limited amount of colors, which will help create a cohesive color harmony throughout our paintings; two, provide a cool and warm color for each primary, which will help us create convincing shadows and highlights; and three, provide different opacities, which will also help us create convincing shadows and highlights.

You can read more on how color temperature and opacity help us create convincing shadows and highlights here, for now let's get into the colors.

Cool Colors

Warm Colors

I selected these colors because not only do they cover the three elements, mentioned above, of a good color combination, but they are also just so easy to work with. Some oil paints can be difficult.

Like Cerulean that is such a weak paint, or Lamp Black that takes 100 plus years to dry, or Van Dyke Brown that dries in five seconds.

All of my paint colors dry at about the same rate, they are not overly strong or weak, they flow well, and they are just beautiful colors.

Additional Colors to Help us make More

For Tints and Shades

Titanium White does dry slowly, but so do all whites. This is the white that everyone uses. Ivory black is a little bit of a weaker black, but it is also mostly neutral in temperature It will not change the color temperature of the color you are mixing it with.

Add black to yellow to make greens and browns.

Browns

Burnt Sienna is THE brown. It is warm, and versatile. If you can only get one more color (as we are now up to eight colors and that is not cheap) I would get Burnt Sienna.

Burnt Sienna

If you would like to know more about different color palette recommendations, below are a few links you may be interested in:

Limited Color Palette

Impressionists, Old Master, and Landscape Color Palettes

Explore Specific Artist's Palettes

Zorn Color Palette

Color Palettes Limited and Semi-Limited

Look for my future blog post, A Beginner's Color Palette: Part 3, to see my semi-limted colors expansion pack.

Do you have any recommendations? Is there a red, blue, or yellow that would be a better pick? Let me know in the comments!

Never want to miss a post? Subscribe to my Newsletter by following the link below:

Subscribe Here

This is a rewrite of my original blog post, Color Palettes: Basic and Beyond.

#howtooilpaint #oilpainting #howtopaint #learntopaint