Something that no one ever asks me is 'where do I come up with the colours for my work?' I'm going to explain it anyway and illustrate it with an example. ¡THREADALERT! 👇👇👇
This is my take on the famous #ScotsLanguage saying 'It's a braw, bricht moonlit nicht the nicht' [Plug: available in my @indy_prints shop as a print, poster, card, magnet and more]. indy-prints.com/search?type=pr…
Harry Lauder used to follow that with 'an if ye can say that, yer aw richt'. These days, I feel more like if you can type that, yer aw richt. Trying to make 'night' fingers type 'nicht' is a bugger. Anyway. The colours.
I get colour palettes from all sorts of sources. I put them together using an Adobe system, that will select the most dominant colours from an image, using various user-selected themes/parameters. (This is way more fun that is sounds.)
For this example, the two colour palettes are based on images from films, which I didn't realise before I started writing this thread. So much for showing variety or planning.
[A quick step back into process.] I tend to draw my pieces using pretty basic temporary colours and then apply colour palettes to the semi-complete art. It's rare for me to go from start to finish in one colour palette.
Different combinations of colours can give very different effects, so I spend a lot of time applying different palettes to get the final work just right.
Back to the example. The first complete version of I made was the brown version. The colours here are from this scene in Wes Anderson's 2012 film Moonrise Kingdom. 
The colours are warm – note the white clouds above have a buttery cast to them. Although its also surprisingly muddy, to my eye this palette clearly represent the scene above.
Applied to the art, it looks like this.
My Scots sayings pieces are always available in a choice of two colours. The other version of this wasn't that great and I replaced it last year.
So the other version now has a red/black feel, which came from Saul Bass' opening titles to the 1954 film Seven Year Itch.
On this extracted colour palette, I lightened the black tone to give it a bit of life. Pure black isn't something I use much on these pieces.
And on the art, it became this. To my surprise, I find it really hard to pick a preference from these two now. The red one really sparks, but there's something warm and inviting in the brown one.
And that's a little insight into how I play with colour. I hope you found it interesting, even though none of you actually asked me about it! 😉
