Earth Tones
Palettes drawn from soil and stone: ochres, umbers, siennas, muted greens and the browns of clay.
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About
Earth pigments are among the oldest colours people have used. Red and yellow ochres, tinted by iron oxides, mark the cave paintings of Lascaux and Altamira, and ochre remains central to Aboriginal Australian painting on bark and canvas. Raw and burnt sienna, named after Siena, and umber gave Renaissance and Baroque painters warm, dependable browns for underpainting and shadow.
A restrained earth palette has often signalled seriousness or closeness to the land. Rembrandt worked largely in ochres and browns, Paul Cézanne built Provençal landscapes from ochre, green and terracotta, and Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso pared Analytic Cubism of 1910–12 down to browns and greys so that structure, not colour, held attention. In ceramics, burnished clay can supply the colour on its own, as in the vessels of Magdalene Odundo. Look for unsaturated, warm tones that sit quietly beside each other.