10 Basic Reasons For Painting With a Limited Palette

In the late 1980’s, I took a design class in college. Our professor allowed us to bring two tubes of paint: black and white, into his classroom. The exact colors on those paint tubes were ivory black and titanium white.

I get it.

The whole idea of this very limited palette was to focus on values and composition, and color of any kind was strictly forbidden.

But I hated this class. Truly – I REALLY hated it.

Finally, in the last two weeks of the semester, he brought out the color wheel and gave us a brief overview of the primary colors and secondary colors. We touched briefly on warm colors, cool colors, and complementary colors.

But too little, too late.

I was traumatized by all the blacks, whites, and shades of gray and refused to paint like that again.

Fast forward 30-plus years, and I participated in a 100 paintings challenge. My subject matter? Simple vessels using neutral color. This was a hard challenge for me, but