Random, balanced, skeleton, or historical. Duck duck goose built in.
Mode
Pull any colors from the Winsor & Newton artist oil range. No rules — pure constraint. Make it work.
Painter
Skeleton
Colors
Robert Henri's Method
Henri worked by choosing a warm and cool version of each primary, then mixing them together in proportions to arrive at a neutral. He painted from those mixed neutrals rather than from tube color directly. Choose your pairs below, then mix before you paint.
Warm Red
Cool Red
Warm Yellow
Cool Yellow
Warm Blue
Cool Blue
Add Titanium White or Flake White as your lightener. Mix your neutrals on the palette before painting. The highest chroma will fall in your midtones.
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Choose a mode and generate your palette.
How to use this tool
A skeleton palette is a small set of colors a painter returns to regardless of subject — a home base. Additional colors are added based on what you're painting. Duck duck goose is a simple rule: if you have two colors with a warm bias, you need one with a cool bias — and vice versa. The same logic applies to transparency: two opaques need a transparent. Use this tool to explore, challenge yourself with a random palette, or study how historical painters built their color relationships. Where original pigments are no longer available or are toxic, closest modern approximations are shown. Palettes marked ✦reconstructed are based on analysis of surviving works rather than documented pigment lists.