Working with just Ultramarine Blue and White can be surprisingly difficult compared to the softer, more subdued character of Raw Umber or Burnt Umber palettes.

Ultramarine has a much stronger colour personality. Even when mixed with white, it tends to retain an intensity that can feel sharp or emotionally charged on the canvas.

Earth colours naturally sit in a quieter, more neutral range. They are forgiving, understated, and often easier to organise into harmonious value relationships. Ultramarine, by contrast, demands more control.

Self Portrait, 1901 by Picasso

Blue also carries a particularly strong emotional association. We instinctively read it both psychologically and visually. If you think of Pablo Picasso and his famous Blue Period, which followed the death of a close friend, you can see how an entire emotional atmosphere can emerge from the dominance of a single pigment family.

Historically, intense blues were precious and symbolic. Ultramarine itself was once made from Lapis Lazuli and was more expensive than gold. Often reserved for the most important passages in paintings.

Some artists became fascinated not just with blue as a colour, but with its psychological and sensory effect. Yves Klein was obsessed with the immersive intensity of blue and wanted blue itself to become the subject.

Klein worked with a chemist to develop a special synthetic resin binder that preserved the raw brilliance of the pigment particles.

This became known as International Klein Blue, or IKB.

Ultramarine Blue + Burnt Sienna + White

Adding Burnt Sienna introduces a warm orange earth colour that beautifully balances the coolness of Ultramarine Blue. Suddenly, you can begin moving between warm and cool mixes, and an entirely new world of colour relationships opens up. It’s a wonderful way to discover just how far a painting can be pushed using only a handful of pigments.

In the still-life jug demo, ‘How to Paint Warm and Cool‘, the entire painting is created using just these two colours plus white, making it an excellent practice exercise.

When working with a single pigment, your decisions are mostly tonal. You are essentially thinking: “Do I add white to lighten the value, or more pigment to darken it?” But once you introduce a complementary pair, such as Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Sienna, you add another layer of subtlety to the process.

Now, as you move up and down the value scale, you are also controlling temperature.

One mixture will lean cooler, another warmer. This naturally develops your sensitivity to colour balance without becoming overly complicated.

The beauty of the palette is its simplicity. If a mixture becomes too cool, you can gently warm it with Burnt Sienna. If it starts to feel too warm or heavy, Ultramarine Blue will cool and neutralise it again. There is a lovely balannce between the two pigments, which is why complementary colour schemes can feel so harmonious and satisfying to paint with.

Ultramarine Blue + Burnt Sienna + Yellow Ochre + White

Building on the Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Sienna palette, introducing a muted yellow such as Yellow Ochre opens up an even broader range of colour possibilities while still keeping the palette controlled.

Yellow Ochre is a warm earth yellow, so rather than creating highly saturated colour mixes, it gently expands the upper warm range of the palette.

When you lighten Burnt Sienna with white alone, the mixtures naturally tend to move towards pinks and warm reds. By introducing Yellow Ochre, you can shift those lighter passages towards warmer golden tones instead, creating a much stronger sense of sunlight, warmth, and atmospheric light across a painting.

This becomes especially useful in illuminated areas of a still life or landscape, where you want the light to feel warm rather than chalky or cool. Even a small touch of Yellow Ochre can beautifully soften and enrich lighter mixtures.

Another advantage is how it affects your greens.

When mixed with Ultramarine Blue, Yellow Ochre creates muted, natural greens rather than vivid, overpowering ones. Strong greens can easily dominate a limited palette and draw attention away from the painting’s structure, but these softer earth greens remain subtle and harmonious.

So rather than expanding the palette into lots of bright colours, Yellow Ochre gently widens the range while still keeping everything connected and restrained. It is also excellent for warming toned grounds and coloured backgrounds, adding a soft glow beneath the painting surface.

Yellow Ochre + Ivory Black  + White

If you’d like to take the idea of muted yellows and greens further, then the simple combination of Yellow Ochre and Ivory Black can be really effective. What makes the palette so interesting is that the Ivory Black begins to act like a muted blue, allowing you to mix very subtle, restrained green hues when combined with the Yellow Ochre. Also, it gets you used to using black in a palette without being scared it will ruin the painting!

As you introduce white into the mixtures, you’ll notice how the black naturally cools the colour range, while the Yellow Ochre gently warms it back again. The overall effect remains soft and subdued. You won’t achieve highly saturated colour with this palette, but that is precisely its strength.

It’s an excellent way to study how desaturated colour often appears in distant landscapes, shadow passages, and atmospheric effects, which can also be a very useful approach for initially mapping out a painting before introducing stronger colour accents.

Venetian Red + White

Using a colour like Venetian Red, or another muted warm earth red, can create a beautiful old-master tonal quality. These pigments feel particularly natural for subjects such as pottery, terracotta, brickwork, roof tiles, and warm architectural studies because the colour family already sits close to the subject matter.

But the real lesson lies in the tonal value of the pigment.

Unlike Ultramarine Blue, which has a naturally deep dark value range, Venetian Red isn’t as dark. It simply cannot reach the same depth of darkness. At first, this can feel limiting, but it actually teaches an incredibly important skill: value compression.

When working with a compressed-value pigment, you begin to realise that painting is not about copying every value literally. Instead, you are organising relationships between values.

If you observe an area that appears extremely dark in your subject, but your pigment physically cannot reach that darkness, you have to reinterpret the entire value structure around it. You begin asking:

“If this is the darkest my pigment can go, how do I adjust the surrounding lights and mid-tones so the painting still reads convincingly?”

That process develops a sensitivity to tonal relationships. You start to understand that a convincing sense of light and shadow comes less from absolute darkness and more from the relative contrast between values.

In this landscape painting lesson on tonal value compression, you can see how values become closer and closer together as they recede into the distance.

This is one of the reasons limited palettes and compressed tonal studies can be so valuable. They force you to simplify, organise, and truly understand the structure of light rather than relying on strong contrasts or highly saturated colour.

How do you bring the palettes together?