I am an Ambassador for Rembrandt Oil Colors now so I thought I would try out the Zorn Palette using Rembrandt Talens brand paint colors. Most manufacturers colors are similar but there are exceptions. Yellow Ochre is a big one, so I really didn’t know if I would be able to get the mixes I like. Thankfully the Yellow Ochre performed great and actually has a little more tinting strength than the Yellow Ochre I was using prior. The Red I used is Cadmium Red Deep. The regular Cad Red and the Cad Red Medium were a bit too light for me. And lastly Ivory Black.
Rembrandt : Ivory Black, Cadmium Red Deep (CRD), and Yellow Ochre.
The first thing I did was to make a chart to “open up” and see the colors and how they related to each other. I took each color and mixed it with white then separately mixed it with the other colors on the palette. So for example the first column is Ivory Black opened up white. The column next to that is Ivory Black with CRD, the column next to that is Ivory Black with Yellow Ochre, etc. The top row of colors contain no white, all the others do. This is just a fraction of what these three colors can do.
This is a picture of some mixes I use a lot with this palette. The top mix is just Ivory Black and White. There are two little mixes in the middle where I added a little red to get a nice muted purple. The green mix is Ivory Black and Yellow Ochre. Below that are all three colors mixed in different percentages to obtain different general flesh mixtures or browns. You can mix almost any type of brown you may need. Which makes it a nice palette for indoor portrait or figure work.
Rembrandt : Ivory Black, Cadmium Red Deep (CRD), and Yellow Ochre.
For me the Zorn Palette has been a great introduction to the vast number of colors that are out there today and I highly recommend it to anyone starting the journey into oil painting, especially if you are doing Portrait or Figurative work.
Anders Zorn (1860-1920) One of my all time favorite painters and one of Sweden’s foremost artists. He wasn’t the only one to use this palette but he made it famous. Below are some of his works.
