Studies using different color palettes

Within painting, it is really easy to reach for color. With all of the different colors available to us in tubes today, it is common to get carried away with shopping for colors and then filling drawers next to your brush holder to easily reach for and add to a painting (and I am perhaps the largest culprit of them all!) However, if we over-color our works with bright colors, we end up with a large problem- we start to substitute value and tone for color. CHROMA AND VALUE ARE VERY DIFFERENT THINGS!

Below I have a color study I did today quickly. It was a first pass, using colors I had on my left over from finishing a different painting on my palette (I wanted to use them up), and admittedly, I got a bit carried away with colors without even realizing it. We all paint "clunkers" from time to time- this one sure was a clunker!

Not to say it's awful- admittedly, there are some great parts of it. The problem, is that there is just one color too many. If I had removed either the purple or green, or even the sky blue, the whole piece would have been great. You see, to balance a piece, you should have (traditionally) a balance of strong and weak chroma colors, and you should mix them. A good general rule is the rule of a Triadic Gamut Map (this idea coined by illustrator and teacher extraordinaire James Gurney). In his book, Color and Light, Gurney takes a simple color wheel like this one:

With this color wheel, we make a dot with pen anywhere far out from the center of the wheel (thus picking a strong color), and then two more points closer to the center. Then, we draw a triangle from the three points. Everything within the triangle is a tone which you can get from mixing colors. By limiting your palette, you make it much easier to create tonal value relationships without getting bogged down by complex colors. 

For this study, the triangle for my color gamut would be something like a weak purple, a weak yellow, and a strong cerulean blue. This gamut would get me all of the weak reds and dark purple red black grays that make up my foreground. It is balanced, and compliments the mood of the piece.

In this, a completely different color palette was used. Here, My strong color was Yellow Ochre, with weaker points being in purple and brown. I cheated as well and used a little hint of a low chroma blue, just to help get things dark enough. As you can see, the warm yellows really pop against the cool other colors, and the relationship between light and dark is easily preserved.