GIMP Version: 2.6.11
Operating System: Windows
OS Version: XP - SP3
GIMP Experience: Intermediate Level

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How does an artist decide how many and which colours to use when creating a limited palette and what will a limited palette do to improve my artwork?

I'm not an artist but my sister is (pro designer/artist). It depends on artwork itself and how it is going to be used.
Website only, large prints, book publishing? As for the artistic aspect, thematic color palettes are very useful.
For example, if you're drawing a portrait, you need skin tone/hair/eyes palettes, for landscapes you need various
nature palettes, etc. My sis uses preset palettes depending on task.
Then again, art isn't a science, look at van Gogh's and some other impressionists' color choices.
Best choice comes from the artist's heart.

I couldn't have it explained better.
Additionally, it also depends on the limitations you're into, if you have to work in indexed mode for instance then palette skills are essentials to build your art.
Of course if you only talked about RVB mode then palettes only serve to reference and give a direction to your art, what K1TesseraEna said in fact.

at school we were once given the task to paint a still life using an extremely restricted palette consisting mainly of shades of a colour we wouldn't normally use. for example i was assigned a palette in grey, black and brown. my friend who tends to prefer blue tones had to paint with only reds and oranges, and so on. i simply hated all my results at first, but after we had finished the task it felt like my sense of colour had taken this magic leap forward. i think using a limited palette now and then can be a good way to exercise your colour sense, whether it's digital work or ordinary painting.

I also am no artist but I've been having good results using 3 color palettes. I do know a lot of it was as explained above but part of it is personal preferences.

I'm not an expert by any means but I'm learning. Just last night I was reading up on color theory. The thing that comes to mind with limited palettes is it help to get your colors shades and tints working together, although I'm guessing that depends on what your working on.

When I first saw your post it reminded of an excellent explanation I recently read. I tried to find it, no luck yet, I'll keep looking. For now here's one to check out, the best parts are near the end with, Proportion & Intensity, Contrast & Dominance, Shades & Tints.
Color Theory: Overview

Absolutely, we can't consider using a limited palette without getting back to the source, which is color theory, we're deciding to build palettes because of this theory. Yet, as said before, this is no science, let's say it is a set of rules you can bend to your will but you can't play with those rules if you don't understand them at first.


Bend the rules, lots of fun indeed, let's see how it works with extreme palette, this image is made by an artist named Helm. This is Red Green Blue + Black, no more, no less.. (:

Art by Helm

Your right about bending the rules, nothing wrong with that, I'm learning everyday.
I really like the effect you got with that image by the way

A limited palette will reign in your work and if done well it will get a balanced and harmonic feel. That said, even if you work with a limited range of Hues (think of these as colour tubes), you may often want to work with a wider range of Values (i.e. mix more or less white/black into the base colour).

When painting on the computer you will get very far (also without extensive colour theory knowledge) with the following simple setup:

1) Use the paintbrush with a 30-50% opacity
2) Make sure you know the keyboard shortcut for "pick color from canvas" (ctrl+click is normally used)
3) Set up a keyboard shortcut for varying Value (nothing is set by default)
4) Pick a few (usually 3) colours (Hues) from your palette that you want to use in your painting. Dabble these down where appropriate.

Henceforth, hide the colour requester. Just use the colour picker to pick up the colour you want directly from the canvas, and adjust its value as needed with the keyboard shortcut. Only paint with these colours. The interesting feature with the method is that since you use low-opacity for your paintbrush you will get mixing of colours - and you can pick up the mix. The result will be that you can in principle deviate from your main 3 colours somewhat. This will generally make it much easier to reign in your colour use than if you were picking colours from the wheel every time you wanted to change it (easier the closer together your 3 original colours were placed on the colour wheel). You can always add extra colours in the end to spice/highlight things but that's just for final touches. Maybe worth a try to experiment.

Of course, there are many ways to go about it and eventually you will want to read some colour theory to at least have a feel for why certain colours look better together than others, how to colour shadows etc.

Also, MyPaint has full palette gamut masking features as of version 1.1 (as far as I know it's the only graphics program anywhere with this feature, go OSS!) - this means you can explicitly mask out your colour wheel to only allow you to use certain parts of it. Worth checking out:

.
Griatch

Oh no, the effect HE got, Helm, I'm far from this level, I'm editing the post to make it clearer

Whoops, my mistake I just noticed the "Art by Helm" part of your post

Nice effect, anarkhya. Is this so called 'pixel art'?

Thanks everyone. Some interesting things to chew over and especially thanks to Griatch - I'll give your tips a go. Bending the rules is a great tip. I have only one rule in art - never treat a technique or principle as a hard and fast rule.

This is pixel art indeed, though an extreme example of the genre, because the painting is based on very harsh limitations, probably to celebrate a kind of "monitor poetry" (I'm interpreting this).
Not every pixel artist wants to draw with only 3 colors, usually, palettes used are somewhere between 16 and 64 colors.