Inviting a guest colour

This article was first published in my newsletter "Notes From My French Easel" – June 2010. 


I have been thinking about the idea of “guest colour” for a while. For oil painting, I like to use a limited palette: Titanium White (Griffin Alkyd), Cadmium Yellow Pale, Yellow Ochre, Cadmium Red, Alizarin Crimson, Burnt Umber, Cobalt Blue or Cerulean Blue, Ultramarine Blue and Viridian Green.

From time to time, I bring along another colour. This is what I call a “guest colour”. I have several reasons to do that.

• The first reason is that the particular shade is hard or almost impossible to mix from my usual palette. A good example is Turquoise blue.

• Another time I would bring a guest colour is when the colour in question is prevalent and, rather than mixing a large quantity of the shade, it is quicker and more productive to use it from the tube.

• I like some colours so much that they were creeping in all my paintings and they began to look too uniform. For instance, Blue Rex is a great blue shade but also very potent. It works well mixed with background colours to push them further towards the horizon. Another colour I was using too much was Sap Green. It is a nice transparent green which is in the midrange and does not have the acidity of other greens. The risk was that I relied too much on it and forgot that I could mix a broad range of green colours with my basic selection of colours. By making Blue Rex and Sap Green guest colours, I treat them with more judgement.

• Bringing in a guest colour helps me breaking the routine. Because I only bring one or two guest colours for a given painting, I can take time to know them better and get the best out of them.

Palette Oil painting Colours Colors