Zorn Palette



"Hins Anders" ~ Anders Zorn

The Zorn palette is very useful and can be a lot less intimidating for artists learning to paint. This palette is a warm palette with the black being the only cool pigment which makes this a good choice for learning to paint portraits. It takes out the frustrastion of having too many color choices and lets you address your values and shapes instead of worrying about mixing flesh tones from a huge color palette. This palette also allows you to get to know these pigments and how to mix together and makes you more familiar with them.

Anders Zorn was a Swedish painter know for his wonderful portraits of people of Sweden and also of his nude figures. Zorn did not limit himself to just those four colors and after you learn to paint portraits and figures using this palette, it's easy to slowly add additional pigments as needed. For instance adding Ultramarine blue would be a great first choice to add to this palette and you could work with these five colore for some time before adding a sixth color and so on.

It limits the number of color choices and when used in more sophisticated compositions it can get you used to locating certain colors next to each other in order to make other colors appear more warm or cool or make on color appear more lighter or darker than it actually is.

The Zorn palette is made up from the following paints:

White
Ivory Black
Cadmium Red Medium or Light
Yellow Ochre

You'll notice the absence of some of the major players in the color world such as blue and green and that is because you're expected to mix them using the above palette.

Yes, you're expected to mix blue from Ivory black and white, orange from Yellow Ochre and Cadmium Red Light or Cadmium Red Medium and make green from Yellow Ochre, Ivory black and white as needed.

"Mona" ~ Anders Zorn

You are expected to place your complementary colors next to each other so they appear closer to their pure colors than they are. For example you're suppose to place you blue mixture next to your orange mixture to make the blue appear more blue.

With the Zorn palette there are chromas and hues that can’t be mixed but mearly sug­gested. Quite often by using warm and cool con­trasts, you can cre­ate the impres­sion of the col­ors that are not really there. A good exam­ple is cre­at­ing the illu­sion of blue eyes using only a mixed grey from white and black by plac­ing oranges, warm yel­lows and reds near the black and white mixture.