Objectives: getting better at picking colours .

I struggle a lot with choosing colours. I know the theory, but still have a lot of trouble with putting it into practice. I chose Charly's class to start with, because it look it looked simple and to the point.

Process: I came over from Charly's other class, "Fun with Faces", to colour my portrait, so I already had my own lineart.

Fun With Colours with Charly Clements - image 1 - student project

01.

For the monochromatic exercise, I started by doing a few thumbnails in my chosen colour.

Fun With Colours with Charly Clements - image 2 - student project

Here's a trick I learned a few month ago: during the colouring process, regularly check the values by looking at a black and white version of your drawing.

You can do so easily in Procreate by adding a layer filled in white, in colour mode, on top of your whole drawing.

And by checking the values, I mean look at your drawing in black and white (leaving the hues and saturations aside) to see if there's enough contrast between your elements (well, the important ones at least) that you can easily read your picture, even when it's really far/small/zoomed out.

Here's my thumbnails in black and white:

Fun With Colours with Charly Clements - image 3 - student project

I really love the version E in b&w, but not so much in colour. I like the F best in colour.

So I kept those two, and went back and tried a few more based on what I liked.

Fun With Colours with Charly Clements - image 4 - student project

Fun With Colours with Charly Clements - image 5 - student project

(Yeah, the n°1 is definitely not the first one I made.)

I hesitated a lot, because I'd imagined him very warm, and I still liked version F a lot, and n°3's pink hair looked great... but the white haired version was the most striking. Also, the one were you see the ceramic eyepatch the most, and I wanted that as a focus point.

So here's the finished picture in its monochromatic glory: Fun With Colours with Charly Clements - image 6 - student project

And with a touch more texture:

Fun With Colours with Charly Clements - image 7 - student project

02.

We'll see later for the moodboard, I don't want to be dragged down the bottomless well that is Pinterest.

03.

I played around a bit with the RGB method and filled a palette with a few variations.

Fun With Colours with Charly Clements - image 8 - student project

04.

As I was preparing for a few thumbnails with complementary colours, I stumbled on a fun way to generate colour palettes.

I had made a strip of each colour with different saturations/values and was going to adjust them when i tapped on the wrong option. But I went along with it and hit the jackpot: an endless supply of ready made colour palettes.

I tried them with silly thumbnails and quickly got addicted.

Fun With Colours with Charly Clements - image 9 - student project

Fun With Colours with Charly Clements - image 10 - student project

Fun With Colours with Charly Clements - image 11 - student project

So here's how I did it (but keep in mind it's a new discovery, not a tried and true process):

Draw two strips of complementary colours, varying values and saturations a lot.
Chose the "Color Balance" tool.
Play around with withe the sliding scales. I found that sliding the "Highlights" all to the left gives good results, and sometimes sliding two of the "Midtones" to one side helps things along.
Then you can play with the "Hue, Saturation, Brightness" tool and/or go back to the "Colour Balance", or one then the other, or maybe just stop there.
And now, warm up your finger 'cause it's time to eyedrop colours and make those thumbnails.

As Charly's mentioned, don't hesitate to adjust the saturation or value of a colour as you make you thumbnail! Sometimes, they need a bit of help to get along.

05.

I chose one of my newly made colour selections and got to work on making those thumbnails.

I created my limited colour palettes on the fly... and still ended up using complementaries a lot.

Fun With Colours with Charly Clements - image 12 - student project

(I see one thumbnail somehow disappeared. I did fill them all, though. Even had to limit myself to those "few".)

I liked too many of them, couldn't make up my mind. I whittled it down to 6, and made larger tests out of them.

Fun With Colours with Charly Clements - image 13 - student project

I was still indecisive. I was only going to end up making one, though. So, even if the white ones stood out the most, I really liked him with blue hair.

So I went with it, and here it is, finally finished:

Fun With Colours with Charly Clements - image 14 - student project

Conclusion: Charly's class was really worth the time I spent on it. I learned a new tool (Recolor, my new best friend), discovered an easy way to get assorted colours and developed an addiction to colour thumbnails of weird alien plants.

Thank a lot, Charly!

Marion Lauro

Illustration & Storytelling

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