Zorn palette

What is Zorn Palette? 🧐

Master artist Michael Lynn Adams steps you through a simple exercise where you'll learn the amazing versatility of the Zorn limited palette.

Master artist Michael Lynn Adams steps you through a simple exercise where you'll learn the amazing versatility of the Zorn limited palette.

Click here to watch a tutorial on how to mix a Zorn palette and paint Alla Prima!

By Adriana Guidi in Art Tutorials > Painting Tutorials When you’re first taught to paint with a limited palette, you’re usually given three primary colors—red, yellow and blue. Limiting yourself to just a few colors teaches you how to mix colors correctly, see value and temperature, and encourages thought and planning in your color choices. Today we’ll discuss a different limited palette, one that was made famous by Swedish painter Anders Leonard Zorn, which is often known as the Zorn…

I had a call regarding the use of Zorn's palette by adding other pigments. The basic idea is to get everything out of the limited three colour plus white palette. Of course you are the artist, so you can do whatever you want. Using the limited palette by itself is a great learning experience. It helps you understand colour and colour theory, and how to mix and place the colours. So lets look at some ways to make the colours work for you. The basic palette is Ivory Black, Yellow Ochre, and…

I remember coming across a reference to the Zorn palette some time ago. I looked up what it was - a palette of just 4 colours used at times by Swedish artist Anders Zorn (1860 - 1920). It's an oil painting palette, but the gorgeous flesh tones many have created using this palette for figure and portrait work intrigued me. I made a note to test them out some time and finally did, using gouache. Zorn is said to have used ivory black, titanium white, cadmium red and yellow ochre. His paintings…

In trying to learn more about gouache I’ve done a few color charts, the basic colors I’ve chosen from M. Graham gouache and an an exploration of the Zorn Palette in gouache. The idea be…

Using the Zorn palette, pioneered by Anders Zorn in the early 1900s, oil painter Christina Kent is able to reliably mix skin tones for a naturalistic portrait.

Here are a few still and progress shots from my recent vignette painting after Anthony VanDyck's painting of Cornelis van der Gesst. It never ceases to amaze me how such a variety of skin tones can be achieved from only 4 colors which are most commonly known as the Zorn Palette. Of course, Zorn didn't only use these colors all the time, but he used them an awful lot. Cadmium red, ivory black, yellow ochre and lead white were the pigments used to create this portrait, and have been a…