Michael Harding Oil Paints: My Recommended Professional Palette
One question I’m increasingly asked by students is:
“What oil paints would you recommend if I want to upgrade to something more professional?”
For me, Michael Harding oil paints are the professional paints I personally use and highly recommend.
You certainly don’t need to replace your entire paint box. Student-quality oils are perfectly capable of producing excellent paintings. But as your painting develops, professional paints can offer greater pigment strength, colour intensity and beautiful handling straight from the tube.
My recommendation is to gradually build a small palette based around a split-primary system, rather than buying dozens of individual colours.
My Recommended Michael Harding Colours
Phthalocyanine Blue Lake
My cool blue. An extremely powerful pigment, so use it sparingly! Fantastic for vivid greens, turquoise colours, cooler mixtures and strong darks.
Ultramarine Blue
My warm blue and one of the most useful colours on my palette. Excellent for skies, shadows and landscapes.
Combined with Burnt Sienna, it can produce everything from subtle neutral greys to incredibly dark mixtures.
Quinacridone Rose Organic
My cool red. Particularly useful for producing vibrant violets and purples when mixed with Ultramarine Blue, as well as flowers, portraits and cooler red mixtures.
Scarlet Lake
My warm red. Excellent for stronger reds and mixing vibrant oranges. Having both Scarlet Lake and Quinacridone Rose gives you much greater control over your secondary colours.
Yellow Lake
My main bright yellow. A strong, vibrant colour that’s particularly useful when you want to retain saturation in greens and oranges.
Lemon Yellow — Optional
For a more traditional split-primary palette, I would add Lemon Yellow as your cool yellow. It gives you the ability to produce particularly clean, vibrant greens.
However, I personally don’t use it very often.
Instead, I prefer having Yellow Ochre on my palette. For the way I paint, controlling and reducing saturation is more useful than having another highly chromatic yellow.
Yellow Ochre
One of my essential colours.
Although it isn’t the cool yellow you’d traditionally expect in a split-primary palette, I use Yellow Ochre constantly to reduce chroma and create more natural mixtures.
It’s incredibly useful for landscapes, portraits, natural greens, earth and stone.
For me, Yellow Lake provides the stronger colour while Yellow Ochre helps control it.
Burnt Sienna
Another essential colour and one I use constantly.
It’s useful for landscapes, portraits, underpainting and neutralising cooler colours.
Try: Ultramarine Blue + Burnt Sienna
By changing the proportions, you can create warm browns, neutral greys and extremely dark chromatic mixtures.
Why a Split-Primary Palette?
A traditional split-primary palette gives you a warm and cool version of each primary, allowing you to mix a huge range of secondary colours.
For example:
Quinacridone Rose + Ultramarine Blue = vibrant violets
Scarlet Lake + Yellow Lake = warm oranges
Lemon Yellow + Phthalocyanine Blue Lake = clean greens
Understanding these relationships means you become much less reliant on buying individual premixed colours.
Learn to mix the colour rather than immediately reaching for another tube.
My own palette adapts this theory slightly by replacing Lemon Yellow with Yellow Ochre because it better suits the way I paint.
A Fantastic Palette for Alla Prima & Plein Air Painting
This is also a fantastic palette for alla prima and plein air painting.
With a carefully selected range of primaries, you have enormous control when working outdoors and can mix virtually any shift in light, temperature or hue you see in front of you.
There is, however, a practical consideration: mixing takes time.
When painting outdoors, the light can change incredibly quickly and you don’t always have time to mix every secondary colour from scratch. This is one reason plein-air painters sometimes expand their palettes with a violet, orange and green.
Amethyst
My optional violet. Useful for quickly introducing violet into shadows, skies and neutral mixtures without having to mix it from red and blue every time. Particularly helpful outdoors where subtle shifts between warm and cool can change quickly.
Brilliant Orange
A useful convenience orange, particularly for alla prima and plein-air painting. You can absolutely mix oranges from Scarlet Lake and Yellow Lake, but having Brilliant Orange ready on the palette can speed up mixtures when working quickly and help maintain strong saturation.
Phthalocyanine Green Yellow Shade
A very powerful high-chroma green, so you only need a tiny amount! Excellent for quickly reaching strong greens before neutralising them with reds, earth colours or other mixtures. A useful convenience colour for landscape and plein-air painting where mixing every green from blue and yellow can take valuable time.
These colours aren’t necessarily there because you can’t mix them from your existing palette — they’re there to speed up the process.
A restricted palette is fantastic for learning colour relationships and gives you tremendous control. As you become more experienced, you may choose to add certain colours simply to make your painting process faster and more efficient — particularly when trying to capture a fleeting moment of light outdoors.
What About White?
For most painters, I’d recommend Titanium White as the practical starting point. It has excellent covering power and strong tinting strength.
I would also recommend trying Michael Harding Warm White.
Warm White is useful if you find Titanium White can sometimes make mixtures feel slightly cold or chalky. I particularly like it for portraits, still life, landscapes and warmer passages of light, where I want to lighten a colour without losing too much warmth.
You don’t necessarily need both, but having the choice gives you another way of controlling colour temperature.
Do You Need Professional Oil Paints?
Absolutely not.
Professional paint won’t automatically improve your painting — drawing, values, colour mixing, edges and brushwork are far more important.
But once you’re becoming more confident with oils, upgrading selected colours can make a noticeable difference.
I’d recommend doing it gradually rather than replacing everything at once. Start with the colours you use most and build your palette over time.
My Michael Harding Palette
My personal core palette is:
Phthalocyanine Blue Lake — cool blue
Ultramarine Blue — warm blue
Quinacridone Rose Organic — cool red
Scarlet Lake — warm red
Yellow Lake — bright yellow
Yellow Ochre — reducing chroma
Burnt Sienna — earth colour / neutralising
Warm White
Ultimately, I’d rather see a student really understand eight carefully chosen colours than own thirty tubes they don’t fully understand.
A traditional split-primary palette is an excellent starting point, but your palette should eventually become personal to the way you paint.
For me, Yellow Ochre earns its place over Lemon Yellow because controlling saturation and creating natural colour is more useful to my painting.
Understand the theory first — then adapt your palette to suit you.
Final Thoughts
There’s no perfect palette — and that’s part of the enjoyment of painting.
These are the Michael Harding colours that work for me, but your own palette will naturally develop as you discover the pigments and combinations you enjoy most.
My advice is to start small, understand your colours and experiment. Add new pigments when they genuinely offer something useful or make your painting process more enjoyable.
Ultimately, it’s not about how many colours you own — it’s about how well you understand the ones on your palette.
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