Limited Palettes

Above you can see a color chart I made using the Kimera Kolors line of paints. Their paints behave much more like traditional artist paints than the miniature paints you’re probably used to, and it means they can make very rich color blends. Instead of using a huge variety of individually bottled paints, by understanding mixing, you can create just about any shade you can think of through mixing.

Using a limited palette really just means, using a finite number of paints to make a large number of colors. If you were to use the full line of Kimera Kolors, you’d be using a limited palette of 13 colors, including black and white. That said, using 13 colors is hardly what most artists would consider a limited palette, since you really can mix pretty much any color you could imagine. The chart above only shows two-color mixes, which is really the very least you should do, you can then control the saturation of the color you mixed by adding white, black, or mixing it’s complement.

If you really want to get limited, let’s talk about one particularly famous limited palette, the Zorn Palette.