Getting in the Zorn
I always mix my own paint colors as a rule — I've owned only cyan, magenta, and yellow (plus black and white) for years — but I've been really into nontraditional primaries lately. It's an interesting challenge that produces interesting paintings, and the Zorn palette is a particularly... limiting limited palette.
The Zorn palette is named for Anders Zorn, a Swedish painter who used it extensively in his work. It consists of cadmium red light, yellow ochre, ivory black, and titanium white, a color selection that locks you out of blue and most shades of green. If you're using the Zorn palette for portraits, this isn't a major limitation, but landscapes are a different story (and guess what I've been using it for)...
The particular paints I've been using are cadmium red and primary black from Holbein, yellow ochre from M. Graham, and permanent white from Winsor & Newton (all gouache, as is tradition). The pigments for those are PR108 (cadmium red), PY43 (ochre), PBk7 (black), and PW6 (white).
I made a really shoddy color wheel to get a feel for the basic color mixes you can get out of these paints (minus white). Cadmium red and yellow ochre make subdued oranges, cadmium red and black make brown, and yellow ochre and black make a very yellow-toned olive.
I'm not wild about painting portraits, so I mixed up some skin colors to paint hands with instead. If you're used to mixing skin from primaries, mixing them with the Zorn palette is so easy that it feels like you're being punked. It feels like taking your training weights off.
Hand paintings, one with light skin and one with dark skin, using the Zorn palette. The paintings are loose and scribbly in style.
As I said earlier, the lack of blue and green is a much bigger restriction for landscapes than it is for portraiture. It forces you to think really hard about temperature contrast since you can't accurately mix most colors. It is great fun, and where I intend on spending most of my time while I'm in Zornland.
The first painting I did used a reference photo that I took of red rocks (and boy, are there a lot of red rocks in Colorado). The main challenge was keeping the whole thing from looking gloomy since a cheery blue sky was out of the question. The sky was originally grey, but I glazed it with a bit of yellow to help it stand out from the mountains more. The result looks like it has a light sepia overlay on it.
A landscape painting. Red rock formations interspersed with olive green trees frame a snowcapped mountain view. The mountains are painted in grey, contrasting the rocks in front of it and the yellow-tinted sky behind it.
I was feeling emboldened by that attempt, so I tried another painting with my favorite trees: aspens! Fall color was a natural fit for this palette, so I focused on creating contrast between that and the background (achieved by reserving the grey for the sky and a hill in the distance). I really liked this one, and I hardly miss the blue at all.
A landscape painting featuring aspen trees on a hill. The trees have their autumn foliage on full display, and the grass on the surrounding hills is also beginning to shift to varying shades of brown. Grey clouds line the sky overhead.
I came up with an alternative "Zorn-lite" palette using Prussian blue instead of black for situations where blue is nonnegotiable, but I've been having so much fun without blue that I haven't had a chance to actually use it. There are some other kooky palette ideas that I'm interested in trying. I'd also like to try experimenting with 2-color palettes.
Footnotes
- Highly recommend checking out James Gurney's blog where he extols the virtues of working with a limited set of colors. ↩
- I'm no art historian, but I've read that Zorn didn't invent this palette. It was reportedly also used by Apelles of Kos, who predated Zorn by a very long time, so you may also see it referred to as the Apelles palette. ↩