The Thanksgiving palette is four families: burnt orange, golden ochre, deep red and brown, held together by the greens and grays that are already fading out of the landscape. What makes those colors work together is that none of them is fully saturated. Autumn color looks rich because it is muted, and the most common mistake in painting it is reaching for the brightest orange in the tray.
The colors, and what each one is doing
Brown. The one that carries the whole palette and the one nobody thinks about. Autumn browns are not one color — bark is a cool gray-brown, dried leaves are warm and reddish, ploughed earth is darker and duller still. A scene painted with a single brown looks dead. Mix them instead: a burnt sienna warmed with red, or knocked back toward gray with a little blue.
Orange. The signature, and the one to handle carefully. Straight orange from a tube is far brighter than any leaf. Mute it with a touch of its opposite — blue — and it immediately looks like something growing rather than something printed.
Red. Autumn reds run deep and slightly blue rather than fire-engine bright. Maple in full color is closer to a crimson than a scarlet. This is where a painting gets its darkest warm notes.
Gold and yellow. Yellow ochre rather than lemon. It is the color that holds the light in an autumn scene, and it is the one that needs two coats on canvas because pale yellows are the least opaque paints there are.
Why the muting works is the simplest bit of color theory there is: each of these sits opposite a cool color on the color wheel, and a touch of the opposite pulls the saturation down without turning it gray.
Why autumn paintings go muddy
Mud is not a color, it is what happens when too many pigments meet at once. Three specific causes, in order of how often they are the culprit.
- A brush that was not properly rinsed. More muddy color comes from this than from any mixing decision. Two water jars, one dirty and one clean, fixes most of it.
- Mixing browns from black. Black plus orange gives a dull olive, not a brown. Mix darks from a deep blue and a red or a burnt umber instead — they stay warm and they stay alive.
- Overworking a passage. Autumn foliage is dozens of small marks of related colors sitting beside each other. Blend them all together and you get the average, which is gray-brown. Let them stay separate and the eye mixes them for you.
The autumn designs we make
October is the most direct answer: autumn flowers massed in pitchers and vases, and by some way the most color of anything in our catalog. It also has the most small sections in it, so it is a slow one.
Apple Harvest is bushel baskets of apples with a white bowl and leaves. A still life rather than a landscape, warm throughout, and one of the more approachable designs to work through.
The Road Home is a red barn and farmhouse at the end of a dirt road with trees around it. It is the most Thanksgiving-table-adjacent image we have and one of our best sellers, which is probably not a coincidence.
Mountain Paradise, Life's Reward and Rocky Mountain Campsite all carry autumn color in the trees against water and peaks, if you want the season as a setting rather than the subject.
Putting the palette on a canvas
Work the background before the foreground and the top of the canvas before the bottom, so your hand never lands on wet paint. Do the darkest browns and reds early — they are the easiest to cover if an edge strays, and they give you something to judge the golds against.
Save the lightest golds for last and give them two thin coats rather than one thick one. Pale colors do not cover printed guide numbers in a single pass, and a thick application dries with ridges and still lets the number show through.
Anything with foliage in it uses more of the mid-tone greens and browns than a kit assumes, so it is worth having a matching extra paint set before you find out two evenings from the end. The rest of the catalog is in one collection.
