This is a reprint of my submission to Salad Magazine issue 2. Check out the other cool stuff people did too!
A gouache painting of an Eastern Tiger Swallowtail butterfly (Papilio glaucus). The butterfly is a bilateral gynandromorph: its left wing has the dark morph female pattern, and its right has the male pattern. It feeds on a white daisy with the dorsal sides of its wings facing the viewer. The flower is slightly out of focus and melts into the green background. The butterfly's wings extend out of the frame.
The painting was done using four paints: Prussian blue, cadmium red, yellow ochre, and white. A glitter gel pen was used to add iridescent glitter to the blue spots on the butterfly's hindwings. The photo of the painting was taken in a sunbeam.
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)...
I love tiny palettes. They're the type of thing that I see and swear I'm going to do [x] (paint) more because I have [y] (a tiny paint palette). I thought really hard about getting a fancy small wooden palette (as seen in this tiny palette mega review by Leslie Stroz), but decided against it in favor of engineering one out of a mint tin. I also love putting random shit in mint tins. I already keep my small cross stitching projects in one (you would be shocked at the amount of embroidery floss you can stuff into one Altoids tin).
