A palette, in description, is the set of colours a picture actually uses — the working range of hues a painter has chosen to limit themselves to.
The word originally names the flat board on which a painter mixes paint, and by extension the colours arrayed on it; in critical description it names the colour vocabulary of the finished work. A palette can be described as warm, cool, earth, jewel-toned, acidic, muted, high-key, low-key, restricted, expansive. A limited palette names a deliberate narrowing — three or four colours doing all the work — and is one of the oldest disciplines in painting. The palette of a picture is usually the first thing the eye registers, before composition or subject; it sets the temperature and mood of the whole.
See also
- tonality — the dominant overall cast of the palette
- monochrome — the limit case of a palette of one
- contrast — how the palette’s colours play against one another