Why I Painted for a Year with Only Three Colours

A year ago, I made a rule simple enough to pin above the desk: every painting would be mixed from the same three colours. I had grown tired of the false freedom of a studio wall crowded with pigments. More choices were available, yet less of my attention was reaching the work.

I chose ultramarine blue, cadmium yellow and burnt sienna. The primed canvas or paper supplied the white without adding a fourth pigment, while the three colours could create cool greens, warm oranges, muted violets, browns and deep neutrals. The aim was not fewer materials as a performance; it was to make hue, value and temperature carry the expression.

At first, the exercise felt severe. I reached for a fourth colour, caught myself and learned to alter the mixture instead. Soon familiar objects changed: the blue of a shadow, the warmth of skin and the atmosphere around a street became more specific because I could no longer hide behind variety.

I documented the year from a share studio in Melbourne, where narrow rooms, shared sinks and laneway coffee breaks are part of an artist’s routine. The experiment asked whether discipline could create freedom. It also revealed how much commercial pressure sits behind a creative practice, and how easily speed can replace attention.

Why Restriction Became the Point

The initial attraction was efficiency. Choosing a colour normally takes seconds, but deciding which mixture will hold a mood can take longer. With the palette settled, I could spend that saved attention on edge, proportion and the physical movement of the brush.

Restriction also removed a familiar hiding place. A weak painting could be rescued with a bright accent, a heavier glaze or a new colour. Under the new rule, every correction had to come from the same source, exposing weak decisions earlier.

A year was long enough to move past novelty. It included deadlines, dull weeks and paintings that refused to improve. By the middle, the constraint had stopped feeling like a rule and started behaving like a lens.

Choosing the Three Pigments

Ultramarine brought depth and a violet undertone; cadmium yellow offered light and clarity; burnt sienna grounded both in something earthy. Each was strong enough to shape the others without taking over, although that balance required attention.

The set also had to work in a small studio. Ultramarine mixed cleanly with water-based paint, cadmium yellow could overpower a thin wash if used carelessly, and burnt sienna could turn a green grey when handled too heavily. Their contrasts shaped every decision:

Pigment Character Useful mixtures Main caution
Ultramarine blue Cool and slightly violet Greens, violets and deep neutrals Heavy use can dominate a mixture and cool it
Cadmium yellow Warm and intensely bright Greens, oranges and bright yellows Its strength overwhelms thin mixtures quickly
Burnt sienna Earthy and red-brown Oranges, umbers and softened violets Too much can turn greens muddy

Mixing remained slower than expected. I learned to make a small neutral first, test it on a leftover strip and adjust saturation before returning to the main surface. The white ground also became active, opening pale passages through thin paint instead of relying on a separate white pigment.

Seeing Value Before Hue

The first real change came through value. With only three starting points, I mapped the image in broad light, middle and dark masses before choosing a hue. Brushwork had to describe form and negative space instead of merely filling an outline.

To keep comparisons honest, I photographed each test in raking light and kept reference photographs, value studies and dated notes in a FantasyCloud project space, so one morning’s judgement did not overwrite the last. Looking back also revealed that my supposed neutrals often carried a green or violet bias.

Mixing a convincing neutral became a daily discipline. Blue and sienna softened each other; a trace of yellow pulled the result towards olive; more white opened its temperature without bleaching it. The palette made colour relationships visible, and viewers began reading the canvases through shifts in tone rather than the loudness of hue.

A Year Measured in Australian Places

Melbourne made the routine concrete. Small painted studies filled a Brunswick share studio, while laneway café tables nearby became informal testing grounds where changing daylight and moving crowds supplied critiques. Independent gallery openings across inner Melbourne added another kind of pressure: work had to hold its composure among neighbouring artists and commercial displays.

Trips to Sydney and Brisbane sharpened the eye. Sydney’s harbour light has a clarity that made weak mixes obvious, while the Gallery Society’s open-studio events exposed the work to collectors and fellow practitioners. In Brisbane, subtropical glare and humidity changed how thin acrylics dried, proving that a colour could behave differently in another climate.

Adelaide supplied the year with a public deadline: SALA Festival in July, when artists open studios and galleries across the city. The Australian market for the resulting series moved between artist-run spaces, commercial galleries and design stalls, with prices set in Australian dollars and freight adding a real cost. A spare image can look calm on a screen and still meet the practical realities of framing, shipping and sales.

Tools and Rituals for a Focused Practice

The palette was only one part of the system. A basic inventory kept the experiment from turning into a shopping trip:

The working sequence was equally disciplined:

What Survived the Restriction

After the year ended, I did not abandon the system entirely. I kept the three pigments for several series, then returned to a broader shelf when a commission demanded subtler colours. The experiment had taught me to use extra pigments deliberately, as accents rather than rescue mechanisms.

Sharing the process at a Mass Musings meetup changed the project again. Other artists compared mixing notes, questioned my use of the white ground and suggested formats for print. A wider selection of studies and finished works is available through the Mass Musings Press archive.

The palette never became the work’s subject. It became a disciplined way of deciding what mattered: which shapes held the light, where a warm note could interrupt a cool field and how much silence the image needed. Three colours did not make the paintings smaller; they made every choice visible.