How Lucian Freud Mixed His Paints: Palette and Color Study of ’Frances Costello’ (2002)

Lucian Freud’s expressionist portraits are widely admired, and often students say that they want to ’paint like that’. In this video I show how he uses a very small palette of paints to achieve a wide range of colors, and give some insight into his working methods. Lucian Freud’s palette was a variation on the Old Master palette (yellow ocher; red ocher; black; white). The palette I use here consists of: - cadmium yellow - yellow ocher - burnt sienna - vermilion red - black - white From this Lucian Freud was able to obtain the full spectrum of colors: Red: from the vermilion Orange: from the burnt sienna Yellow: from the cadmium yellow Green: from yellow ocher and black Purple: from vermilion, black and white Blue: from black and white These colors only really work in relation to each other. For example the ’blue’ is really a cool gray but when it is placed next to warmer colors like the burnt sienna ’orange’,