A Landscape Painter’s Guide to Palette & Pigments – Easel Talk #41
The colors you choose matter profoundly. They’re not just tubes of paint sitting on your palette, they’re the foundation of every decision you’ll make during the painting process. Today I’re the foundation of every decision you’ll make during the painting process. Today I want to walk you through my palette and the logic behind each pigment I use, because understanding why you’re choosing certain colors is just as important as knowing how to mix them.
Starting with Limitation
When I began painting seriously, I worked with a limited palette, just like I recommend you do. Kevin McPherson’s approach was elegant in its simplicity: cadmium yellow, alizarin crimson, ultramarine blue, and white. No black. The beauty of constraint is that it forces you to really understand what each color can and cannot do. You experience the satisfaction of hitting the color you’re trying to mix, and yes, sometimes the disappointment of falling short. But here’s what matters: if it’s close enough, use it. No one will care. It all works out.
When I started expanding, I added yellow ochre and burnt sienna because these are colors that are genuinely difficult to mix from a limited palette. You end up adding tiny bits of this and that, which gets frustrating. But that frustration teaches you something invaluable about color relationships.
My ideal minimum palette remains: titanium white, cadmium yellow, cadmium red or alizarin crimson, phthalo or prussian blue, and ivory black. That’s it. Everything else builds from there.
The Mystery of Color
There’s magic in the tubes, but you can’t understand it until you start exploring. And you have to start with just a few colors. If you begin with too many, you’re overwhelmed. You’re already making countless decisions as you paint. Adding a palette you don’t understand just makes you flounder.
Don’t worry about matching my palette exactly. If you’re trying to recreate one of my paintings with a limited palette and it falls short, remember you’re not looking for immediate outcomes. You’re heading toward that mansion on the hill, and you’ll get there. The magic isn’t in the tube anyway. It’s in your mind.
Quality Matters
Avoid student grades entirely. They deliberately reduce pigment load, and you’ll pay for that decision in frustration. I use premium paints and brands like Georgian, though not everything in every line works equally well. As we talk through each color, I’ll explain why certain grades make sense for certain pigments.
Palette Organization and Consistency
I arrange my colors counterclockwise, moving from light to dark. The specific logic matters less than consistency. Always put your colors in the same spot. Always. You don’t want to break your painting flow searching for a color. I top up all my pigments before I start painting for exactly this reason. There are already too many decisions to make without fumbling around looking for paint.
Titanium White
You need white. Most of it goes into your sky, then into grays. I use two whites: pure titanium white (PW6) and titanium buff. The buff is bleached, slightly less bright, and honestly, I don’t always need that maximum brightness. Georgian’s titanium buff is just as opaque as pure titanium white but costs half the price. I’ve been using buff for two or three years now and wouldn’t want to be without it. But don’t think you can use only buff. Sometimes you need that brightest bright. If you’re starting out, having both gives you more forgiveness. I don’t need forgiveness. I want straight-up white.
One practical note: if you find a color or brand you like, stock up. We’ll talk about Mars Yellow in a moment, and that’s a sad story.
Cadmium Yellow
This is expensive paint because the process of creating the pigment is intensive. Cadmium yellow is very strong, really opaque, genuinely yellow, and it moves toward the greenish side unless you force it warmer. A little goes a long way. You always know what you’re doing with cadmium. I use cadmium yellow light, and I only need one strong yellow. Some artists have whole collections of yellows. That’s fine. I have two other yellows behind it that feel more natural, but cadmium yellow is my workhorse.
For a long time I worked with lead white mixed with titanium white and avoided cadmium because I’d been taught they conflicted, that they could oxidize in mixtures. That’s not true. Someone on the channel corrected me years ago, and since then, probably 2018 or 2019, I’ve been committed to cadmium. They’re strong, opaque, consistent. A little goes a long way.
Yellow Ochre
This is an earth pigment, which means it’s dirt, essentially. It’s not expensive to produce, which is why you can get good quality at reasonable prices from Georgian or Winton. Don’t go student grade though, because they’ll strip out the pigment load.
Yellow ochre is one of the first colors I’d add to a limited palette because it’s genuinely difficult to mix but incredibly useful. Use it in your grass, in your skies as the horizon approaches. It has greenish undertones you’ll often need to compensate for, but that’s part of its character. It brings chalkiness to your mixtures, and chalkiness is just another way of saying pastel, which is exactly what you want in skies. Yellow ochre is essential.
Mars Yellow
I own twelve tubes of Mars Yellow. I probably have enough to paint until I’m eighty. Here’s why it matters: all earth pigments except yellow ochre tend to be extremely transparent. When you want a raw umber tone, transparency becomes a problem. Mars Yellow is opaque, which means I can mix it with raw umber to create opaque versions of umber tones, something that’s incredibly valuable. If I were as successful as I should be, paint companies would create an opaque line of umbers with my name on it. Until then, I mix it myself.
Raw Sienna and Raw Umber
Raw sienna should be darker and redder than yellow ochre, especially useful for addressing that greenish problem. But most raw siennas you buy are essentially the same color as yellow ochre. I have a drawer full of useless tubes. The Blocx brand works well if you can find it.
Raw umber is a desert island color for me. I painted without it for seven years, then had a restoration project where I kept struggling to hit certain colors. It dawned on me the original artist loved raw umber. I bought a tube, everything clicked into place, and now I wouldn’t want to be without it. Raw umber is the warm color killer. When a color straight from the tube feels too chromatic, too unnatural, raw umber brings it back to earth. I very seldom use it full strength because it’s too transparent, but mixed into other colors, it makes everything feel more natural. It’s invaluable.
Mike’s Green
This is the one I mix myself: hansa yellow and ivory black. It looks like cadmium yellow at first glance, but it’s about half the opacity and semi-transparent. The magic happens when you combine them. Look at that. The most beautiful, natural green. It’s not fake like sap green or permanent green or phthalo green straight from the tube. Those are too intense, too crazy. Mike’s green is a good base because it’s honest.
Half the time you’ll see me take this middle green and add burnt sienna to it, which we’ll discuss in part two. You can tint it with orange, raw umber, mars yellow, white. You can create infinite variations of grayed greens. We see more green than any other color in landscape painting, so having a base that isn’t artificial matters.
Cadmium Orange
One of my favorite uses for cadmium orange is mixing it with blue to get interesting grays through complementary color theory. It’s beautiful and incredibly useful. You can mix it with mike’s green to get a lovely highlight color, something I do more often than mixing cadmium yellow with green. Sometimes you think you want cadmium yellow for a light green, but orange does a nicer job. It’s great for warming mixtures subtly without tipping into red, and you can mix it with burnt sienna for a wonderful orange tone.
I brought cadmium orange into my palette around the same time as cadmium yellow, and I wouldn’t want to be without it.
What’s Next
We’ve made it through the foundation colors, from white through orange. Part two will cover the reds, the blues, the earth pigments I haven’t discussed yet, and the rest of the palette. There’s much more to explore, and understanding each pigment’s character will transform how you approach color mixing and painting decisions.
The key takeaway for now: start simple, understand your colors deeply, and build from there. Your palette should serve your vision, not overwhelm it.
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