Wednesday, 15 April 2015

Narrative Illustration/ Development. Choosing a Colour pallet



With the change from mid-century comes a change in colour chose. I’m going to base my final illustrations on the character sketches I have done previously. For those designs I used watercolour and a dulled out colour scheme. After using mid-century I have found the joy of bright colours, this also works considering the young audience. Water colours are naturally more dulled out but can be layered to make the colours more interesting.

For These experiments I used watercolour blocks and water soluble inks, which are basically brighter more concentrated watercolours. I know from past experience how to use These mediums I just want a set of colours and techniques to use in my illustrations. James and the giant peach would benefit from bright colours but I didn’t want to go overboard. 

The watercolour blocks are much more toned down compared to the inks. The swabs below are a comparison of some natural colours in both of the mediums. This is the set of colours I use to base most of my work. I find watercolour blocs are better for basing an image as they always appear more washed out. Inks are good for adding brighter parts to an image and doing blended effects. I only own organic colours in water colour blocs where I have nearly a full range of inks. I find I don’t need more then this because these mediums mix really well, providing a wide range of colours. 

On the swab image there is clearly some bleeding around the ink examples. This happened because I was using poor quality watercolour paper, the pigment was also left to pool on the paper. I would not normally do this because this bleeding issue tends to happen. 

I would like to use the limited set of organic colours I used in the colour swab and then add more interesting colours over the top using thick coats of ink. Using the same base colours will help to keep all the illustrations looking consistent even if I use different colours to highlight the base coats.

I carried on with some more experiments with this set of colours to see how far I could push them.

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