Materials · 3 min read
A limited watercolour palette for Marrakech
A small warm-and-cool palette for ochre walls, tiled courtyards, palms and deep shade.
Marrakech contains intense colour, but painting it does not require every bright pigment in the box. A limited palette makes the relationships clearer and helps the finished page feel held together.
Begin with four useful roles
Exact pigment names matter less than knowing whether each colour leans warm or cool and whether it mixes cleanly with its neighbours.
- A transparent warm earth for walls, pottery and neutral mixtures.
- A clear yellow for sunlit green and warm variation.
- A deep blue for shade, tile and strong neutral colour.
- A red with enough strength for flowers, cloth and lively darks.
Mix the place before painting the object
Combine warm earth with blue for quiet architectural shadows. Add yellow to the same blue for palms and garden greens. Let red enter the earth mixture for deeper terracotta. Those shared ingredients make very different subjects feel as if they belong to the same light.
Make a five-box travel test
- Sunlit ochre wall
- Cool courtyard shadow
- Dusty palm green
- Dark doorway
- One vivid accent
Studio notePaint the five mixtures on the paper you will actually use. Colour behaves differently on a travel sketchbook page than on a bright white studio sheet.
Begin with three gentle atmospheric watercolour exercises, then receive occasional practical notes from the studio.
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