Anna's limited palette (6 colours)

Working with a full palette of 18 colours

As part of Anna's Standard Kit, she uses and recommends a full set of 18 paint colours (the details of which you can find here).

She finds that these paints give the most flexibility for achieving the vibrant range of colours in nature, and make the colour mixing process as easy as possible.

Painting with the 'Essential Range' of 10 paint colours

Some of those 18 paints can be substituted by mixing other colours from the set, and by doing this is it possible to scale down the number of paints on your palette for Anna's classes to 10 colours.

Anna calls these her Essential Range of 10 paints.

All of Anna's tutorials can be painted with these 10 paints (though some you'll need to do more colour-mixing than if you use the full palette).

Introduction to using a Limited (6 colour) palette

There may be situations when you'd like to further scale back the number of paints on your palette. For those wanting to try this, Anna's been experimenting and has found that a lot of the colours in nature can be achieved with just 6 paints.

She has created a video which explains when you might want to work with a limited palette, which colours she recommends for this and importantly why, and the pros and cons of working with a limited palette in this way. You can watch the video here.

Tutorials using Anna's limited palette:

You'll find that using Anna's limited palette, you can complete most of the tutorials - but of course you'll need to work out your own colour mixes as Anna may be using more paint colours in the classes.

To help you get started with working from a limited palette, Anna's creating a selection of tutorials, the first of which is already in the library - Blue Skyflower.

There will be more classes designed to work from a limited palette to help with colour mixing from the smaller number of paints.

And there are a few existing tutorials in the library that happen to use only the paints from Anna's limited palette. Searching 'limited palette' will help you to find them.

What are the 6 paint colours?

The paints Anna uses in her limited palette are:

What about setting out these colours on your palette?

If you're dedicating a separate palette to Anna's limited palette, you may find colour mixing easiest if you set out the paints in the order of the Munsell Colour Wheel as Anna shows in the video.

If you're likely to be adding more paint colours to your palette over time, and you're leaving your paints to dry on the palette like Anna does, she suggests you set out your paints in this way, leaving spaces where the other colours will go.