drawanyway.com

This is going to be a two-part post. Or, at least, a two-part task.

A while ago, I did an excellent Saturday course at Brighton University (I link to it because I really can’t recommend it highly enough if you are local to this area) on illustrating picture books for children.

One tip the tutor passed on was totally new to me, and it had that ‘Ah! So that’s how the professionals do it’ feel to it.

The very first thing we were asked to decide, before we started making our books, was what ‘palette’ we were going to use. We were instructed to go away, play about with our chosen medium, and select a range of between three and ten colours.

Those would be the only colours used throughout the whole book.

Why? Because it’s a way of ensuring some kind of unity across all your pictures. You might find that your central character’s looks slip out of your control, making her look like a small kid on one page and an old lady on the next; you might have your action moving between wildly differing locations like supermarkets and space rockets - but if you keep to the same set of colours, all this will be more forgivable. And it lends a very professional veneer to the set.

Even if you are only drawing a single picture, it’s still a very good habit to get in to. Take a complex subject, say, a landscape: there might be seventeen different shades of green across several hills and fields, but you don’t have to capture that completely accurately. Narrow it down to five and your picture will be easier on the eye, apart from anything else.

So, today’s task - choose your palette, and tomorrow you’re going to draw something with it.

Of course, it’s easier with some media than others. With felt pens, crayons - anything that produces a standard colour that you have no control over - it’s simply a matter of choosing a bunch of them. But with media that you can mix or dilute, like watercolour paints, and inks, it’s a matter of remembering precisely how you arrived at your chosen colours. Also, with these media, it’s best to keep to a smaller number of colours, because within each colour there are already so many variations depending on how dilute you use the paint.

If you’re on the computer, Photoshop makes it extremely easy for you - you can either pick your colour from their ’swatches’ palette (each one is given a name if you hover over it), or select something more esoteric by double clicking on your foreground colour on the toolbar, and bringing up the entire spectrum. You’ll notice* that the hexadecimal code is given at the bottom of the dialogue box (with a # in front of it), so if you make a note of this, you can re-enter the same code to find precisely the same colour again. And of course, if you are using solid colours, you can even more easily pick them up with the dropper tool from areas on the picture where you have already used them.

* As previously mentioned, I am running Photoshop 6.0 on a PC.