Aaron Westerberg - Creating a Zorn Palette with Rembrandt Oil Colors

By Aaron Westerberg

The Chart shows some of the range of the palette, as you can see it is fairly large. The Colors are basically the simplified primaries : Red, Yellow, Blue.

This is a color chart I made using the “Zorn Palette”. This was not Anders Zorn’s only palette he did use other colors, especially when he worked outside. This palette refers primarily to his indoor work.

Let me explain how I laid out the colors. The first swatch (upper left corner) is Ivory Black, and below I have lightened it with white in four steps. Next to that is Ivory Black mixed with Cad Red, Ivory Black being the dominate color in the mix. I repeated this with all the colors being careful not to repeat myself. The chart is labeled at the top.

This is a picture of some of the mixes I use with this palette. The top mix is just Ivory Black and white. The two little mixes in the middle I added a little red to get a nice muted purple. The green mixture is Ivory black and Yellow Ochre. Below that is all three colors mixed in different percentages to obtain different variations of muted browns.

For me the Zorn Palette has been a great introduction to color, I highly recommend it to anyone starting the journey into oil painting, especially for indoor figure and portrait work. You can obtain many of the colors you might see indoors, which makes it nice especially when just starting out with color.

Anders Zorn (1860-1920) is one of my all time favorite painters and one of Sweden’s foremost Artists. He wasn’t the only one who used this palette but what he did with it was amazing. Below are some examples of his work. Enjoy!