Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.
Rollo May
The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.
Orson Welles
When I first started painting, I thought that the way to make good art involved expensive brushes and as many tubes of paint as I could afford to buy. I rarely came home from an art store outing without another new-to-me colour.
I don’t think I’m alone. Newcomers to many activities have a tendency to focus on the ‘gear’, thinking that having ‘more’ and ‘better’ will translate into brilliant outcomes.
Not surprisingly, adding a ninth shade of blue to my palette didn’t improve my abstract landscapes. In fact, the more colours I added, the more disjointed and ‘beginner-ish’ the work looked. Sometimes less really is more 🙂
One of the early exercises in an online art course I participated in last summer had us explore a range of limited palette exercises. My favourite was the black and white assignment: tape off a large sheet of watercolour paper into a grid of 6 or 8 squares. Using only black and white, mix as many different shades as you can and paint freely and intuitively over the page. Take off the tape and fine-tune the individual pieces by adding contrast in tone (light vs dark), composition (shape variation) and mark-making.
Rather than feeling constrained by the limitations, using a limited palette removed the temptation to ‘improve’ a piece by simply adding more colour and forced me to get more creative. What other types of marks might I make to bring more energy to a piece? How can I use just variation in tone to draw the viewer’s eye to my focal point? Is the actual composition of the piece working or do I need to alter the size and placement of shapes?
Lately, I’ve been working with just three colours. Carbon black, Titanium white and Alizarin Crimson. It’s amazing how many shades you can mix from three tubes of paint. Below are some cropped areas of the early layers of a new series (if you’ve been following along on Instagram, you’ll know that these are much farther along now, and even more interesting as I’ve learned how to draw even more tonal variation from my palette).
Do you have a favourite limited palette? Which colours are in it?