Reference

The Zorn palette

Four tubes that teach value faster than a full set. Here is why it works, and the things it genuinely cannot do.

The four colours

Anders Zorn was a Swedish painter working mostly in the late nineteenth century, and the palette that carries his name is a reconstruction from his paintings rather than a written instruction he left behind. Whether he used exactly these four for everything is genuinely disputed. What is not disputed is that the four of them work.

Why it works

The trick is that ivory black is not only a dark. Mixed into white it makes a cool blue-grey, and that grey is close enough to a low-chroma blue to stand in for one across most of a portrait. So the palette has a warm (yellow ochre), a red (cadmium red), a white, and a black that quietly does the job of a blue. That is a full range of temperature with nothing left over.

The second reason is what it takes away. With four colours you cannot solve a problem by reaching for a different tube, so you have to solve it with value and with temperature, which is where the answer usually was. Painters who spend a month on this palette come back reading value better, and that improvement stays with them when they go back to a full set.

What it cannot do

Do not take it outdoors expecting to paint a summer landscape. There is no green you can mix that is not a dulled ochre, and no sky blue at all. Foliage in strong light and a clear midday sky are both outside its reach, and no amount of skill will get them out of these four tubes.

It also struggles with anything genuinely vivid: a red dress under strong light, a painted wall, flowers. Those need a chroma the palette does not carry.

How to actually learn from it

1. Mix a full value string first. Before you paint anything, make nine or ten steps from your darkest mixture to white and look at how quickly value moves.
2. Find the grey. Mix ivory black into white and watch it turn blue. Then warm it back with a touch of ochre. Most of a head sits between those two.
3. Put the red away for the first hour. Block in with ochre, black and white only, and add the red where the flesh actually turns warm. Beginners use far more red than a face contains.
4. Judge relationships, not colours. Ask whether a passage is lighter or darker, warmer or cooler than the one beside it. With four tubes that is all you can do, which is why it teaches so fast.

Written by Soren Ulsig. Last updated 2026-08-29.