Why I Use A Limited Colour Palette For Expressive Landscape Painting

Hello and welcome to this week's video. Firstly I just wanted to say I'm sorry it's been such a long time since my last upload but I'm finally back to creating again and I really enjoyed making these sketch paintings for today's video. This week I'm going to spend some time painting expressive landscapes in my sketchbook using acrylics and a colour palette that I've been developing and refining. The base colours that I'm using are ultramarine blue, cadmium yellow, yellow ochre, cadmium red, burnt umber, mars black and titanium white. My sketchbook is from Sea White of Brighton and it's their A4 cartridge paper sketchbook which I'll link in the description box below because I've really been enjoying working in this lately. This painting on board here is an example of the palette that I've been working with recently. It's still unfinished but I really love the warm earthy and natural combination of colours because it feels much closer to the atmosphere and emotion of the landscapes I'm inspired by. I'll also continue working on this painting alongside the sketchbook studies so you can see how the palette translates across different surfaces and compositions. Before I started painting I swatched out the full colour palette here in my sketchbook on the left hand side. Every colour you see is mixed and none of them are directly from the tube. I tend to prefer working with mixed desaturated colours because they naturally harmonise together and help create a more unified painting overall. When colours are slightly muted I think the contrast and relationship between tones become much more interesting and it allows small areas of brightness or warmth to feel much more intentional and impactful. The muted tones feel calmer and more organic to me and I find that they create a much more cohesive mood across a painting compared to using very bright or highly saturated colours straight from the tube. There's something about these soft desaturated mixes that feels timeless and grounding, especially for landscapes and coastal scenes. I'm not using any photo references for these sketches today but I do have a few recent compositions and studies in my mind whilst I'm painting. These sketches are really about exploring this palette further and testing how far I can push the contrasts, values and textures within a limited range of colours. I also want to see how the palette behaves across both landscapes and seascapes and whether it captures the atmosphere that I'm looking for. Working with a fixed colour palette is something I've found really helpful recently because it removes one layer of decision making from the process. Instead of constantly thinking about what colour to choose next I can focus more fully on composition, shapes, values and mark making. Sometimes simplifying just one part of the creative process gives you much more freedom overall because your attention shifts away from overthinking and towards responding instinctively to the painting itself. I think limitations can actually be incredibly freeing creatively. They encourage you to be more inventive with what you already have rather than endlessly searching for more options and feeling overwhelmed by too many choices. I'm just using a Caran d'Ache Neocolour 2 here to help re-establish the horizon line within the piece. You'll probably also notice that I'm holding my brush right at the very end of the handle whilst I paint. This really helps me to make looser, more expressive marks because it gives my wrist and arm a much wider range of movement. Holding the brush this way stops me from getting too tight or overly focused on tiny details early on. I'm also using fairly large brushes for most of these sketches for the same reason. Bigger brushes naturally encourage simplification and help me to focus on the overall feeling, movement and structure of the landscape rather than getting caught up in rendering every detail. I use a palette knife too for the different marks and textures it can create but again avoiding making precise and detailed marks. I think some of the most expressive parts of a painting happen when you allow marks to stay unresolved and slightly still. Now and then I lightly mist the page with a spray bottle of water. This helps the paint move much more freely across the surface and creates softer transitions between colours. I find it really useful for keeping the process loose and expressive because the paint flows and blends naturally on the page rather than feeling too controlled or rigid. It also helps to create those atmospheric textures and edges that work so well for landscapes and seascapes. I'm just adding some finishing touches now with some more directional and bolder brush marks. I really hope you enjoyed spending this quiet painting session with me today. I'd love to know if you prefer working with a limited colour palette when you paint or do you enjoy having a wider range of colours to choose from? Let me know in the comments below. Alongside these sketchbook studies I've also continued developing the painting on board by building up thicker layers of paint and pushing the darker values and contrasts a little further. I'm trying to create more depth and atmosphere while still keeping it loose and expressive. Thank you so much for watching especially if you stayed subscribed. Whilst I've taken a YouTube break I've still been planning new ideas and thinking more intentionally about the kind of content I want to create moving forward. I'm really excited about what's to come and I'm hoping to upload much more regularly from now on. It really means a lot to have you here and I'm excited to share more videos with you again very soon.