Here is something of a companion piece to the other Cahors market painting I posted a couple of days ago:
“Légumes du Jour”
 Oil on Linen, 20×16″
For purchasing info, please contact me.
For both this painting and the previous market painting I have again experimented with a single primary palette of just 3 colors (red, yellow, and blue) plus white. I don’t normally use a huge palette any way, but sometimes I feel I can become over-reliant on certain colors. Using a very limited palette helps me to feel as if I am taking back in control of my color mixing and really forces me to think more about color relationships. It also pretty much ensures more unified color. My three primaries for these two paintings were cadmium yellow pale, cadmium red medium, and ultramarine blue, and the white was titanium.
Jennifer
Young; Vibrant LandscapesOil Paintings and Art Prints Online
My Website
Subscribe to my newsletter
Subscribe to my blog
Contact Me!
Subscribe with Bloglines
Hello Jennifer,
I really like your market place paintings! Something about the red & white umbrellas in a painting always pulls in. Also, like your challenge of the limited palette makes packing supplies a lot easlier. Love your blog always inspires me! Take care!
Good hearing from you Marty. The market paintings were fun and I plan to do more of them. Just the subject matter alone is a nice challenge, dealing with both the architecture and the figure, as well as trying to keep it loose and accurate at the same time. The limited palette seems a challenge at first, but the more you do it the easier it is. It is very instructive too. I highly recommend it as at least an experimental exercise, even if you don’t intend to always paint with it. It does have it’s limitations, of course, but on the other hand, to my mind, it often seems better to know the extent of what you can do with a few colors, rather than only knowing a little of what you can do with a lot of colors. As my understanding has expanded, so has my palette, but I still return to the limited palette again and again to keep things fresh.