Zorn Palette Course: 1 - Introduction to the Palette

palette refers to a palette of colors attributed to the great swedish artist anderson born in 1860 and died in 1920. zorn was a successful international artist and one of the most acclaimed portrait painters of his era his sitters included three american presidents and countless other notable sitters in europe all painted with his renowned confident bravoro brushwork for lots of artists his name is attributed to his famed limited color palette consisting of just four colors titanium white yellow ochre vermilion red and ivory black cadmium red is more commonly used in place of vermilion by modern day artists although he didn't use this palette exclusively for his painting this limited color palette features most predominantly in his portraiture work whilst this may seem like an extremely limited range of colors zorn demonstrated through his magnificent painterly approach just what is possible with such a limited range of colors as seen in these beautiful works in this portrait of zorn painted in 1896 you can clearly see the artist at work holding his palette which has his four preferred colors white ochre red and black this portrait was painted using just those four colors so how does it work how does the zone palette work and how can we get a wide range of colors from so few so let's have a look at the colors that we're going to be using for this course and find out a little bit more about them and the properties and characteristics they offer when painting so i've got a cadmium red which traditionally zorn would have used a vermilion but the millions of color isn't really readily available these days but cadmium red or caddy red light is a perfect alternative it's a very warm light red ever so biased towards the yellow side of the colour wheel spectrum and then we have a yellow ochre which is a sort of a dirty darker tonal yellow which has been around for a long time it's an earth-based pigment the other colours which are technically not colours are titanium white it's the brightest coolest coldest white available and ivory black now ivory black again has been used for a heck of a long time and it's a very cool black in that when you add white to it it appears very very cool which is incredibly important when using the zorn palette as i'll explain i want to put some of these colors straight up onto a white canvas so you can see how they look against white as opposed to the brown of my palette so i'm going to take the titanium white and lay that on first you might not be able to see this because it is incredibly in fact the white paint is ever so slightly whiter than the paper itself and i'm just using a piece of canvas paper but any old board would work fine i'm just going to wipe the excess off my brush and pick up some of the yellow ochre and put that next to it so you can see how it reads really quite dark in a tonal value against the white yellow oak has got a really dark component to it it's not bright anywhere like the cadmium yellow or lemon yellow so very very useful for the darker shadows now let's take some of the cadmium red and put that on it really stands out very punchy really catches the eye when look from a distance that fiery bright red and lastly let's take the ivory black now you can use any other black whether it is lamp black or mars black or any others but i find this tends to be the best and this is the one that zorn used so those are the four colors that are available to us but how can we mix them a little further to offer us a wider color spectrum let's start and make a sort of a color wheel and i'll show you how we can make almost a representation of the color wheel so all our elements of the color just using these limited colors so we'll start off with our primaries so i'm going to take cadmium red and i'm going to put a sort of a bit of cadmium red at sort of 12 o'clock um on the color wheel now we know the three primary colors are cadmium red or bright primary red and a bright yellow which is usually a sort of a lemon or cabbage yellow now of course we don't have that so i'm going to have to substitute the primary base yellow for the ochre which is a bit darker and dirty and i'm going to put that at a sort of a third across so i'm going to put mine about sort of there so there's my yellow the last primary color of course is blue now we don't have blue on the palette now this is where the black comes into play because we have a little bit of an optical illusion in that when we put white and black together it will of course make a gray now gray of course doesn't look blue in itself but it's all about comparison and when we lay it near or against other colors it will look cool and it will sort of almost read as a blue the eye kind of puts it towards the cooler bluer side of the color wheel so although this is a flat grey color when compared against the warmer yellow and red the eye kind of reads it as a blue and it's very useful for sort of cool shadows and parts of the face and shadows so these are the three representational primary colors but how do we sort of mix our secondaries let's start with orange just clean the brush let's take a bit of cadmium red and yellow ochre so that's essentially mixing our red and yellow to make our an orange it's quite a dirty dark orange which sits quite nicely there so we've got red orange yellow and between yellow and this blue we're calling it uh for the sake of this uh experiment we're gonna mix the ochre and the gray so essentially what we're doing is mixing the ochre and the black to make a green now it's a bit of a magic thing in this if ever you try this if you take yellow or a yellow ochre in our case but any old yellow does this and take a little bit of black by mixing them together it sort of turns a little greeny the coolness of the black changes the property of the ochre and turns it into a bit of a dirty sort of olivey sagey green as i'm putting in there so you're never going to get a bright acidic green like a viridian or emerald green but again it's all comparative this when placed near a warmer red sort of reads and bends towards the green side of the spectrum so the last color i need to mix is the color that's between red and blue which is a purple and we get that by mixing cadmium red and black if you take those two together you'll get a very sort of dirty red and if you take a hint of white you bring that into it it'll push it ever so slightly towards the purple side if i kind of put that there you get a very sort of dark plum sort of color which is sort of a reeds again as a purple now by taking the white the titanium white in all of these colors and sort of pushing that towards the middle if i just take some titanium white and pop it in the middle there a little bit more so it's not quite as dirty there you go by sort of bridging the gap between the the colors available in the color wheel let's see what happens i'm just putting lots of primary thick based white on there which i'll kind of mix into it on the palette so let's just take some of this white and take it up into the red and of course we all know that if you mix red and white you'll get a nice light dusty pink you've got a very interesting range of colors there wiping off that brush let's do the same now with the orange by taking the white up and mixing it in with the orange it always comes as a burnt sienna or sort of indian yellow color really beautiful color there and let's do the same now with that sort of oakery green color which i've got here so take the yellow ochre and just take that into the white this is where you get your very pale sandy light yellows now let's take it into that sort of green mixture which is sort of here you'll substitute green i'm going to put a little bit more black just a tiny bit more black into this it's very very similar to the yellow ochre but it's just that slight tony little darker and slightly cooler compared to the ochre now let's do the same with that interesting combination mix here of the black and white brush just a little bit mixed up let's just kill that there you go so it's quite dark there and as i bring it further down it's going to get paler and paler until you get to really very cool soft grays in this area here and of course the further out you take it of course you can go blacker and darker that's a really interesting range of blues or bluey greys that you can mix and then let's finally do it with our sort of purple or a purple substitute it's a plum color i'm just getting paler into that middle section there so there's our sort of range our sort of substitute color wheel and the variety of colors that you can make just by using the two colors black and white now that's all very good but how can we utilize this for a portrait i want to try and get a range of skin and tonal skin colors and tonal values how do you achieve that using the zorn palette well i'll start i'll do a little column from left to right and i'll start off with absolute black we'll take some neat black and i'm just going to put it here just on the left hand side here so you've got absolute black of course perfect for shadows or dark hair and color of the eyes and so on but i'm going to push that up now a little bit we're going to take a bit of the reds cadmium red just a little bit and you take cadmium red and mix that with the black so you get really dark deep beautiful shadows they're very warm shadows so excellent for those transitional tones that you see on the skin going from black up to ochre so that when the red and the black go together you get some beautiful warm shadows very very good for the shadows across the face let's just build that up a little bit more so moving slightly away from the black a little bit more paint on the brush so you're starting to see the purity of that red and that starts bringing the cadmium red and that ochre together now there she got a really rich sort of dark orangey color i'm going to keep pushing up through using a little bit more of the ochre so just pushing towards that now getting away from the red and the black and when we get to this stage i'm going to start bringing in my titanium white so the titanium white mixed with the ochre and cadmium red by mixing those three colors together we start hitting the sort of the lighter mid tones here and of course the more white we add the paler it gets i'm also putting a little bit more ochre into it as well just a tiny bit so it's getting slightly cooler as well okay reads are slightly cooler than the cadmium red and again more white as we push up towards the top part the lightest value until you eventually get to absolute pure white so just using those two colors red and ochre and black and white you can get a full range of skin tones from darks and mid-tones and highlights which is why the zorn palette is fantastic for portrait painting so now we've had a look at the colors let's put it to work to create a portrait

Channel: Peter Keegan Artist

Views: 67,615

Keywords: Portraits, Portraiture, Zorn palette, Painting class, painting, art, allaprima, zorn, zorn palette, oils, oil portrait, portrait painting

Id: ai_cGQxoYP8

Length: 12min 34sec (754 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 13 2022