Learning To Use Color is Much Easier When You Do This! 5 Benefits to Limited Color Schemes. 

I LOVE the bible verses at the end of your videos. I have been told that many times by fellow artists to limit my pallet. However I did not listen and bought tons of different colors. As a consequence….I sometimes have difficulty mixing a color I want. I do have my favorites though and am getting pretty good at knowing them. Good advice. Thank you

Wow! I am amazed at your ability to make the rocks and the forest look 3-d. Your negative painting is exceptional. You really made the rocks and the trees pop off the page. Thank you.

And all of a sudden- rocks! Love the colors used!

Great explanation. So soothing watching a painting appear to your mellow voice accompaniment.

Nice painting Steve and a wonderful topic. We are all guilty of adding this color and that color to our pallets until we get ourselves thinking more about colors than values and composition. A great reminder that we all need to step it back on the colors sometimes and make things simple. It s amazing how much you can learn by limiting your colors. Hope you and your family had a great 4th!

This is a beautiful painting. Love that you did it was just 6 colors. Thank you for sharing.

I confess, I bought one of those giant 100 watercolor sets for using in coloring books. We were traveling a lot & I though a multi-colored set to take with me in the car would be easier to use than colored pencils. When my hands get tired, a brush is so much easier than a pencil. The paint is nasty, but it fills in the spaces easier than pencils. I haven't touched the paint again.

Nice landscape painting , thanks for sharing

Hi, Steve. I'm really happy that you've done this video on limited colour choices, and explained it so succintly. Thank you! I've always appreciated the fact that you usually use just a few, and that has made me feel less isolated in an ArtTube world where for the majority, it seems, convenience colours are an absolute necessity because "I don't have time to mess about mixing colours." and huge palettes with 48 or more colours is a norm. I'm really sad, because I feel that they are missing out on so much fun, so much excitement so much satifaction, from playing the "What if..." game, and so much they could then pass on with enthusiasm and knowledge, to help others.... (especially if they played the 'What if...' game on camera!) Since my beginning with focussing on watercolour, (that's 28 years ago), I've only had 12 colours in my box, all used, but rarely more than six at most at any one time. I've never needed anything else. I've painted landscape, seascape, people, places, still life... in the UK and many places overseas, all with just 12 colours. I've taught students with the same set of 12, who've looked at me as though I were crazy at first, but as soon as they began to mix, they almost all got really excited! A minimum number of colours with 12, mixed one by one of the others, is 144, and in truth, the possibilities are infinite. Entered in medieval French architecture! When I moved here, with landscape painting at quite a distance and a vastly decreased budget for things like fuel for the car, plein air was limited to drawing random people from life (free, unsuspecting life models!) and urban sketching. Lots of variety there, from medieval to modern, and I'd done quite a bit in the Uk, obviously, but suddenly I came unstuck, colour-wise, and lost confidence. It was very disconcerting! But eventually, I discovered (thanks to an ArtTube friend!) that Titanium Buff, in very small (pinhead) amounts can work really well. (I'd broken the habit of a painting lifetime and tried Titanium White in various mixes, but still couldn't quite get what I needed). On its own, Tianium Buff works where that colour's needed, but normally, it's to mix with one or another colour to get the oddly-tinted and very opaque pastel shades of the architecture. I'm still learning to use it, still not really understanding why I can't get 'it' with the colours I already have, but I believe that we never finish learning - there's always something new to surprise me, even after mixing colours for years! I am getting the hang of it - slowly, but getting there. I have a play palette of all sorts of oddments (30 in total) which I've picked up across those years, mostly as freebies / free samples, which have languished in the paint storage box till I moved here. Being confined to home at times due to health issues influenced getting them out to play (though I had to buy a larger paint box...), and I'm glad that I did. I have a great deal of fun 'just playing' (eg blobs are fun - blobs of paint allowed to run and mix on the paper, blobs of colour to see what I can 'see' in them and drawing that into them - the 'What if...' game again!) But in the end, my 'workhorse' paint box is still 12 colours + Titanium Buff. 😄

Beautifully painted. And great advice.

Hullo Steve, I have been enjoying working on an elongated pad of paper I recently purchased an 8x20 pad from Jerry’s and a ROBAX Palette! They make several round plastic palette configurations. I have even purchased the well inserts to allow easy removal and changing of paint colors even brands. Mixing as much as I want! The center has a 3 tiered mixing area and you can even buy an additional well section for more choices! This is in direct opposition to your video, BUT I like having a wide selection of different colors on hand without needing to dig around for a color I know that I have but don’t remember exactly what palette I last put it in! Yes, I keep my travel palettes separate and refill as needed. This ROBAX palette is amazing. I am going to get the lazy susan base so it will spin on the table and make switching colors that much easier. The best part of having the well inserts is that you can place your “limited” palette choices together in one section or switch to a rainbow order so easily. Thank you for sharing this sweet painting video with us.

I have my personal faves in my 8 colour mini palette. (When I say mini, i mean mini: 5,5x2,8x1,8cm or roughly 2 x 0,8 x 0,4 inches and it unfolds like a book and half of it is a mixiing palette and on top is something to clip onto the sketchbook.) I have space for 8 colours and I thought I would use it only for travels. 😂 No, I don't. It's pretty much my exclusive palette now. I can do everything with it! EVERYTHING! (For my purposes it's btw: Yellow, Magenta, Cyan, a black replacement, a nice default green for basic foliage, a nice purple I like to do shadows with and a dark brown that resembles my families hair and a custom mixed skin colour that resembles my families skin tone. And I can mix every skin tone with that. Easy. But for myself I paint mostly my family. Sometimes I miss a nice red, but I can mix it and I can also use the HUGE collection I have :D)

And now we have beautiful color harmony! Very inspiring! Thank you Steve.

Thank you for a really stunning demo. Limited colours are always a bonus. Like you mentioned, too many colours make mud. I learned from a wonderful South African artist, Louis Audie. He was a chemist and mixed a lot of the Winsor & Newton colours when he worked for them many years ago. He taught me to use just 6 colours - plus white for oils, plus water for watercolours.

Love watching you paint...Don't think I could ever paint like you do... But I can take notice of your video and use a smaller pallet. Thanks for the video, it made a lot of sense 👍

Love the limited palette with this painting!! Thanks for sharing Steve!!

That definitely helps. Thank you so much. ❤️

Wow I love 💕 the color palette 🎨 choices you have. This is such a wonderful piece of landscape artwork that you made. I’m always so inspired by what you do & share with us. Thanks so much.

I'm always amazed to see a gorgeous painting appearing out of some random brushstrokes ✨ I really like the colours you used

Lol color collector here. About 70 something colors but love using a limited palette. I've learned so many valuable things from your channel. Btw cool t-shirt. 😎

great advice...I work mostly with paper arts and crafts, and your "limited pallet" advice is very helpful; it seems that with more choices, I get anxious and either don't create or over create, losing the focus of the piece.

I love the purple effect in the trees. It adds a kind of sparkle to the scene. And your rocks!

Great video and beautiful painting Steve! I like to buy new colors but found that having too many colors at hand while painting was distracting. I solved my problem by purchasing small 2 x 2 inch metal tins and squeezing my paints into these tins. Then I bought one of those 18 inch long magnetic bars for holding kitchen knives and when I start a painting I select 8 or 9 tins (from my collection of 100 or so) and stick them to the magnetic bar and set it on my painting table. I remove the lids to paint and close them when I'm done to keep dust out. The bar is stable. The tins have plenty of room for large brushes. I do all my mixing on easy to clean rectangular ceramic dishes. It works great to create a custom limited palette of a few colors on the fly. Great for experimenting with various limited palettes. The tins also work well for mixing up a puddle of paint for pouring paint right out of the tin for that technique.

Im new to your Channel, i saw very much of your Videos, and i like your Style and teaching very much!!👍🍀 Greetings from Switzerland 😊👍🙏🇨🇭🤗

Color collector, I’m using that. Thanks for your help always.

Love watching you paint. Thank you.

Thanks for this video. I’m trying to limit my palette at the moment.

🎉 Amazing painting ,I love very much ,thank you for sharing with us your useful advice

I am definitely a color collector LOL and I have tried to use many different colors in one painting. Oh my gosh I just end up with such a hot mess!! Learned fairly quickly that was not the way to go, and your explanation of why this does not work really helped to clarify my intuitive feeling about it. And of course, I absolutely love how beautifully you are able to paint anything and turn it into something mesmerizing! Thank you Steve!

Somehow I think I may be interested in buying these colors as a set, in the future. 🤔

I like your painting, I am going to try a limited palette. Thankyou

I love these colours.

Beautiful! Great info.! Thank you!

Great explanation! Thanks!

Very informative, and I am one of those people who has 80-100 colors 😮

Steve, The video was/is very informative and helped me because I always wonder what color to use then get too many colors going on in a painting. Thank you so much for the instruction. Also, why do I never see you sign any paintings?

I think it's not necessarily a problem to have a palette of 24 or 48 colors. The important thing is to select a limited number of colors according to the subject of the moment. Thank you for this video and for the sublime landscape!

❤ I love limited palette recipes. Thank you for explaining 'dragon's blood'... it's come up in a couple videos and I was curious about what I could swap for it. 😂 In your palate list, it indicates MaimeriBlu hooker green. Is that the pure pigment PG17? ...or the complex PG 7 - PY42 - PY139? Do you use the pigment information to help you make a limited palette? ❤ inquiring minds want to know... I can't wait to try this out. Thank you so much. 😊

Great video, thank you. Can you tell us if you use single pigments or does it not influence you with your color mixing?

Great video as always, Thank you for your amazing videos. How do you treat your watercolour paintings if you frame them without glass? Take you :)

I’m the queen of mud lol 😅

Personally, I think this is a very strange color scheme! Not a fan of the magenta and orange next to each other -- but that's just me. I do enjoy playing with limited-color palettes; it's one of my favorite things to do!!

👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻

What brushes are you using for this painting?