How I Plan and Choose Colors for My Work

Hello Moonbeams, 

I get a lot of questions about how I choose colours or where my inspiration comes from with colour so I thought I would give you a rundown.  

Last year I switched from doing my colour compositions, the little rough drafts I use to figure out a colour scheme, from traditional painted thumbnails to digital.  This comes with several pros and cons.

Pros: 

✦The pros with digital are that switching between colours instantly is incredibly fast and easy when you just want to get going on the painting process.  

✦ You can also use other digital tools such as gradient maps to find different colour schemes without consciously laying them down yourself.  I have not tried that method myself but it seems incredibly fun.

✦ I have found that this method can also help encourage me to push colour further.  Given how bright digital colour is, it can inspire me to push my watercolours more than is typical for the medium.

Con: 

✦ I would mainly recommend using this method if you feel you can transfer your digital colour compositions into traditional media.  Real paint can look so different from its digital version which can lead to some challenge and dissatisfaction.  Knowing your paint mediums really well in order to translate the digital paint to traditional or else being content to not make an exact copy of your digital colours with your traditional medium is helpful. 

You have probably noticed that my colour mockups are frequently quite different from their traditional final forms.  This is because, although I love planning and find it super helpful to pre-plan colours,  I also love to be somewhat loose and experimental in my process and very frequently take a new direction, sometimes so far from the original that it is hilarious!  Sometimes plans help spark ideas totally separate from the initial plan which is fun!

So how do I get my colour scheme inspiration?  It varies.  

✦ I have lots of photos saved within my Pinterest of various landscapes that I love to look at for ideas.  

✦ I also have a board of colour palettes (seen on the right) although I do not find the little colour blocks to be particularly helpful but they are still fun to browse for inspiration.  

✦ Digital art is also a big inspiration.  I tend to browse a lot of rough, painterly digital art, particularly concept art.  Nathan Fowkes is a great example with his beautiful colours, and excellent use of value (dark and light) which brings so much depth.  

And that brings me to my final point.  Values

Values in many ways are the backbones of a piece of art.  I used to pre-plan these using pencil but I switched to digital for them as well. Values are one of the greatest assets we have when it comes to creating depth.  They are still something I want to push much further in my work. Although none of my actual paintings start out in black and white, being able to reference the basic light and dark structures I planned as I work through a piece is a huge help to me.  

~ Aria