When Pumpkins are not Orange
Pumpkin colour study
Colour is one of my worst enemies. I have been struggling with colours for a while, especially humans. Local colour (realistic colour) was always my go to. Everything was fine until I started drawing human. Not sure what the problem was but something was not right whenever I painted my human characters. Being stuck for more than a year and I realised the problem was not the way I drew the character, it was the colour I used.
Drawing from life on my sketchbooks do not come across this problem as I usually use only 1-2 colours. But for final artwork, the colour part can take me up to one week, just trying to fix one drawing. Recently, I revisited an inspiring interview of Chris Haughton about his way to work with colours. I decided to ditch the “the sky is blue and trees are green” concept and play around by drawing people with unrealistic skin colours. And here they are.
As you can see, I have also limited my colour palette to 2-3 colours and I relish the result. I found my voice in these illustrations and of course, I saved so SOOOO much time from choosing colour. Growing up, I always strike to be that good girl who follow every rule and listen to whatever my parents told me to do. I was being dishonest about my thoughts and needs. Hey, it is okay to break the rules(as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone). Rules are BORING.
Ocean doesn’t need to be blue.
Grass doesn’t need to be green.
Pumpkin does not need to be orange.
You can still tell what they are.
A lot of great creativity comes from restrictions.
—Giles Duley
After ditching local colours(realistic colours), I tried to use colours to show emotions. It will be a shame not using pumpkin characters as you all know, it is autumn now! I chose 5 emotions to play with: happy, sad, calm, angry and spooky(not really an emotion but hey, it’s October!)
I then changed the image to black and white to see the effect of colours on emotions by comparing both images. Can you tell the differences?
My observation:
I can still tell the emotions of the pumpkins, with their facial expressions and body languages. Yet, colours do help a lot in creating the atmosphere.
There is nothing wrong using local colours. There are a lot of great artists out there have created amazing artworks, even using local colours. What I am trying to do is to encourage you to experiment and play around, find a way that works for you right now.
Hope you have a spooky weekend!
