Why do my colours
turn muddy?
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The full narration of the video.
The more paints you squeeze out, the grayer the painting gets. A dozen colors on the palette a dab here, a dab there and it all ends up a dull gray. Ninety years ago, a painter who once ran an art school wrote a whole book about this.
His name was Fletcher, and he ran the Edinburgh College of Art for sixteen years. Paint makers sold over a hundred colors yet the old masters often had only six or seven. One portrait painter told him he used just four colors, plus black and white.
Why would fewer colors look cleaner? Fletcher started by drawing a circle. Twelve colors in a ring, yellow at the top, violet at the bottom. Mix two opposite colors, like yellow and violet and they slide to the center and turn gray.
Mixing at random drags your colors through that gray center again and again. Fletcher's fix was to start with just three colors. The three points make a triangle and every mix you make lands inside it.
Colors outside the triangle never get in so the whole painting looks like one family. And he didn't space them evenly. He chose gaps of four, three and five. That puts two colors almost opposite so they make each other brighter without clashing.
Four, three, five. You'll find that on a piano too. An octave has twelve keys four steps up from Do is Mi, three more is Sol and five more brings you back to Do. Fletcher said picking paints is like picking the key of a song.
Turn the triangle one step and you're in a new key a full turn gives twelve, flip it over and turn again for twelve more. Twenty-four keys in all, the same count as music's major and minor keys. If the three aren't bright enough, add a few neighbors in between, up to seven.
Mix only with neighbors, never across the palette. This is the Fletcher palette. He called it a key of color. On a real palette, it's seven blobs of paint in circle order with yellow at the top center.
It's not a law of physics, just one old painter's experience and art teachers still teach it today. Next time you paint, squeeze out just three tubes and try one picture. Then come back and tell us which three you picked.
In one line
Pick only three colours and mix only inside their triangle, and the painting stays clean.
The British painter Frank Morley Fletcher wrote this method down in a 1936 book. He ran the Edinburgh College of Art for sixteen years. He called a chosen set of colours a "Key of Colour". People now call it the Fletcher palette.
Why more colours
turn grey
Put the colours in a circle: yellow at the top, violet at the bottom. Mix two colours that face each other, and the mix slides to the centre and turns grey.
Paint shops sold over a hundred colours. Old masters like Velázquez and Rembrandt often worked with six or seven.
How Fletcher
picks them
On the palette: seven blobs in wheel order, yellow at the top centre (the layout in chapter four of the book).
Why it is like
a musical key
A piano octave has twelve keys. From Do, go up four keys to Mi, three more to Sol, and five more back to Do. Fletcher's four, three, five is the same.
Twenty-four keys in all, the same number as major and minor keys in music.
It is not
a law of physics
not clumsy hands
Quick check
In Fletcher's view, why do colours turn muddy?
Colours facing each other mix toward the grey centre; pick three and mix only with neighbours, and every mix stays inside the triangle.
