drawanyway.com

Yesterday I wrote about working within a limited palette.

Of course, colour is a massive subject area within art, and there is a lot to consider when you are making a choice over which colours to use for a picture or series of pictures.

A first impulse is probably to go with your instincts, to choose colours that you yourself respond to. There’s nothing wrong with that - in fact, your own personal preferences of colours and colour-combinations are probably part of what go to make up your own style.

If you don’t think you have this particular sensibility, have a look around you. What decisions have you made about the colours that decorate your house, or the colours you wear? Is there a certain top you always wear with another one because they look nice together? A pleasing combination of colours where two walls meet in your home?

There are practical considerations as well when you are choosing your colour palette. As well as colours which sit well together, there are other ones which, it is almost universally agreed, dissonate when seen together. I’m not saying there’s no place for purple and yellow, or orange and brown - just that you should think carefully before you sit them together (also, fashions change, and seem to affect our tolerance of certain colours and colour combinations. Pink, yellow and orange in a Pucci swirl was so very Sixties that by the Eighties it was abhorred - until the Sixties came back into fashion again…).

When you are selecting your limited palette, paint a small square of each on a page, and think about:

• the overall effect
• how each colour looks on its own
• how each colour looks beside each of the others.

This might seem a lot of faff, but it’s the sort of thing that eventually becomes second nature. You get to know which colours work well together, develop your personal taste, and find that often you can skip this because you’re doing it subliminally.

You might remember learning a bit about colour theory at school. All of us seem to have created a colour wheel at some time, be it for a Physics class or an Art one. Were you taught about how colours opposite one another on the wheel - green and red, purple and yellow, blue and orange - created a flickery visual effect? And how those nearer one another - blue and purple, yellow and green - are more harmonious together?

Anyway! Enough about theory - let’s see your pictures. I’m hoping your selection of colours inspired you so much that you have made something wonderful.

(PS: I have just snuck a look at a book which a web designer colleague keeps on her desk - which I’ve been dying to do for ages. It’s really nifty, with thousands of colour combinations laid out on each page, so you can see at a glance which colours go well together. It’s a desirable, pocket-sized object! So I’ve put more details on the Recommended Books page.)

And here’s my drawing for this task.