Chris Saper's Palette

[Chris Saper]

Painter: me

Oil colors:

Cadmium lemon (Winsor-Newton)
Cadmium scarlet (W-N)
Permanent Rose (W-N)
Alizarin Crimson permanent(W-N)
Dioxazine Violet (optional)
Ultramarine Blue (Utrecht)
Pthalo Green (Utrecht)
Thalo yellow-green* (Grumbacher)

Titanium White (Utrecht)
Ivory Black (Optional) (Utrecht)

Notes: This is what I consider to be a very limited palette. I intially learned to paint in oil from Phil Beck, who uses a basic 7-8 color palette. After working with this palette for some time, I revised it based on the color research of Stephen Quiller. Same number of colors, more attention to the accuracy of tube complements. Thalo yellow green is a color I have added every time to my palette (after writing "Painting Beautiful Skin Tones", so it doesn't appear in the text). It is a wonderful neutralizer for warm skin colors, and is of value since ITS value is equivalent to cad scarlet. If you neutralize your lighter reds with a complementary green like Pthalo or Viridian, they become so much darker, that you then need to lighten and also temperature correct the mixed hue.

As I am much more an alla prima painter than a glaze painter, I don't deal much with transparent colors. Depending on the circumstance, I might add other optional colors (like Cad Yellow light for florals, or Sap Green for landscape backgrounds), but these colors don't rountinely find their way onto my glass.

Despite my bias that "less is more", I do continue to experiment with other colors. Over the past six years, the only color I have added as a standard is the Thalo Yellow-Green. In the back of the closet, I have a box filled with hundreds of dollars of almost-new colors I will never use again. Recently I picked up John's Old Holland Naples Deep and Cobalt Violet, and will play with this pair for a bit.

The only other color I would mention is Terra Verte, which I use to tone canvas, and to under-sketch in oil. Verdaccio, without knowing it!