The "Zorn palette"

Anders Zorn was a great Swedish painter that is well known among artists for his aggressively limited palette.  I learned of Zorn and his palette from Juan Ramirez, a fine young painter who often uses limited palettes (I have two of his paintings on my wall!), and it has certainly influenced my software.  He didn't always do this, but he often used just white, black, red, and yellow (or sienna).  If you look at the paintings in the web page above you will note a distinct lack of blue and green.  In my last blog post that is essentially what I use.  While this can be distracting for things like skies, it isn't always; note the blue jeans become grey jeans.  It preserves skin tones, which is why it is so common for portraitists.  You can see some secondary evidence Zorn often used just those colors in this self-portrait from wikipedia: