Frank Frazetta

I had mentioned in a previous post about limited palettes and I remembered that one of my favorite modern fantasy illustrators often used limited palettes. So today I am going to talk about "The Silver Warrior". Frank Frazetta is a home town favorite as his home and museum are only about 40 minutes from my house. I have had the pleasure of visiting the museum, meeting Frazetta's wife and enjoying the masterworks they have on display there.

Frazetta uses a cool color palette in the blue range of the color spectrum in this piece, high lighted with small areas of what appears to be yellow ochre and burnt sienna. The lack of greenish tints in this piece leads me to believe that he used Ultramarine blue rather than prussian or pthalo blue. There are some purple hints in the snow and the sky that remain on the cool side, which leads me to believe that he was using alizarin crimson, which is cool red and when desaturated with white would give these type of hues. Frazetta also uses these blues, and possibly raw umber for the skin tones which actually forces a feeling that the warmest parts of the this piece are actually the whites of the bears. (One thing to note in this piece is the decision to not paint any reigns from the warrior to the bears. I have read that Frazetta couldn't make them work, so left them out.)

This painting makes me want to go paint with this color palette as well as do some more research into limited palette options.