I've come to realize that for me, golf and plein air painting have a symbiotic relationship. A soft-pack golf bag made to take clubs on airplanes serves as a suitable container for my clubs, as well as a tripod, hardboard panels and assorted other items needed for plein air painting. It creates the heaviest set of golf clubs checked onto a flight, but I figure if I don’t exceed my 50 lbs. limit, it should be fine. Since I don’t take a full set of drivers and wedges on trips, the initial weight of my set of clubs is less than that carried by a typical player. For this trip, my total bag weight was 39 lbs. along with my panels and tripod.
 
So while golfing and painting during a recent vacation in California, I got a chance to experiment with a limited palette that I’ve been anxious to try. (No, I did not golf and paint at the same time. This combination slows down the game too much and really upsets the course officials.)  I must credit this palette of colors to Scott Gellatly, Technical Support Representative at Gamblin Artists Colors Co (http://www.scottgellatly.com/). His paintings are amazing. While the palette I’m about to describe isn’t his exclusive palette, Gellatly and I discussed it as an alternate limited palette during a past visit he made to Washington.

It’s a fairly simple three-color primary palette composed of Indian Yellow, Quinacridone Violet and Prussian Blue. (You can substitute Phthalocyanine Blue for Prussian Blue without any drastic modifications.) Each color alone and the combination of colors to create secondary hues provide a fairly muted palette. Each of the primary colors is somewhat low in chroma and value. Adding a bit of white helps to bring out the full extent of their character. I liked the range of greens made with Prussian Blue and Indian Yellow. The violets are fine made of varying combinations of magenta and blue. Orange hues are fiery and a good start for making earthy browns when mixed with a bit of blue and black. Adding white to the secondary green mixture doesn’t create acceptable green hues for landscape painting. Titanium white turns mixed greens into pale, minty hues that are not within a range I like for landscape foliage. Interestingly, Indian Yellow combined with titanium white makes the yellow appear to be sullied with a blue grey cast. This is one case where the cool bluishness of titanium dioxide works against the combination of yellow pigments used in Indian Yellow. This effect is partly due to Indian Yellow being transparent and susceptible to the overpowering influence of a strong, opaque, cool pigment like titanium white. This mixture might look better with a less powerful, semi-transparent mixing white. As I said at the start, the overall palette is muted so when I need to achieve high chroma colors akin to permanent green light, cadmium yellow medium or cadmium red, I really need to add those to the palette to achieve a broader range. I don’t mind doing that, since the need for opaque pigments to round out this palette is welcome. The missing component is an opaque blue. Cerulean does not really function for me as an ideal opaque blue. It’s intriguing that a fairly neutral or cool opaque blue has never been synthesized.

Regardless of its few shortcomings, I am anxious to put this palette through a real challenge and take it outside for a plein air session.  Perhaps I will post the completed painting. Do you have a favorite simple, minimal palette of colors?  Please share them with me. I always find it interesting to discover what colors an artist is using.