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', it will appear blue. Indeed the warm and cool aspects of this palette are key to how it works.

This closely related group of paints is favored by a lot of portrait painters because it makes it possible to capture the subtle shifts of color in (mainly white European) skin tones.

We will see how Lucian Freud uses this palette as I create a color study of his portrait of his grand-daughter Frances Costello in 2002. This is a more sympathetic piece than many of his other works, which is perhaps why I like it! I continued to work on the study after the video finished and you can see the more complete version at the very end.

Next I plan another 'Interpreting Great Paintings...' video, this time looking at Giorgio Di Chirico's 'The Song Of Love' from 1914.

The next painter whose palette I want to show you is Anders Zorn who used a tiny palette. Again he was mainly a portrait painter, and I plan to use his 'Man and boy in Algiers' work to show how other types of skin tone can be achieved.

I hope you enjoy the video! Please don't forget to like and subscribe, and I always enjoy reading your observations and questions in the Comments, and I try to answer each one.