If You Only Had 6 to 9 Colours To Paint A Forest With, What Would They Be ?

So here's a thing I can't say enough of.

Always buy the best artist quality oil colour you can afford.

Student oil paint is made using chemicals not pigments. It smells, it fades, the colours have no strength and all of that plus more makes painting so much harder and painful to do.

I've been painting in oils for 5 decades, trust me, you don't need quantity you need quality.

These 6 colours with give you great results and will put the pleasure back into painting without burning a hole in your pocket.

1, Titanium White

2, Cadmium Lemon

3, Cadmium Orange

4, French Ultramarine Blue

5, Burnt Sienna

6, Ivory Black

A great addition to these 6 colours would be;

Naples Yellow. Alizarin Crimson, and Sap Green

Titanium White and Ivory Black mixed together will give you lots of cool greys. Add a little orange to give you warm greys. Adding small amounts of grey will reduce the chroma of any colour.

Cadmium Lemon and Ivory Black will give you a nice green. Add Sap Green to increase the chroma. Add more Cadmium Lemon or French Ultramarine Blue to alter the hew. Adding Cadmium Orange to any green mix will make a warmer green.

Cadmium Lemon and French Ultramarine Blue will give you a wide selection of high chroma greens. Add Cadmium Orange or Burnt Sienna to warm these greens up

Cadmium Orange will control the chroma of French Ultramarine Blue. Adding Naples Yellow will to this blue mix will change the hew of the blue to a more sky blue colour and with Titanium White make a great low horizon sky colour.

Add Naples Yellow to Titanium White for a warmer white. Add a small amount of Cadmium Orange to this mix for great natural cloud colours.

French Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Sienna make a transparent black. This mix when you add a small amount of solvent will give you a transparent stain to map out or draw your image onto the canvas with. Add more Burnt Sienna to this mix and it gives you a warm classical Imprimatura coloured stain to use as an underpainting. Ideal for starting paintings of forests, still life and portraits. Add less Burnt Sienna or more French Ultramarine Blue to this Imprimatura mix for painting seascapes and skies.

Burnt Sienna and Titanium White will give you a range of reds

In short this is a very versatile 6 to 9 limited artist quality colour palette that will give you more pleaser and happy painting moments than a hundred tubes of cheap student paint.

I have included two Imprimatura underpaintings of mine showing the two different colour mixes with more Burnt Sienna for the forest and more French Ultramarine Blue for the seascape.

I invite you to ask me any questions you might have about the above colours and their mixing options.

Please feel free to ask and leave a comment.

Martin .

34 comments