Colour Experiments

Today I've been doing a few colour experiments to see how my illustrations for the book will look using a limited colour palette. I've found a limited colour palette works well for me because I am colour blind and can often get confused when I introduce too many colours leaving my work looking less than professional. One good example of my success using limited colour was the Craig Oldham poster I did at the beginning of this year.

I thought I should have another go at working this way and at the same time see if I could find a quicker way of developing my illustrations.

I already had most of my illustrations drawn up in illustrator so I placed them all together on the same document and began trying different colour combinations. Once I’d decided on the colours this made the cross-hatching stage a lot easier and I methodically went through each illustration borrowing bits of cross-hatching from the previous illustration and speeding the whole process up.

Whilst researching about limited colours I came across the brilliant work of Michael Hacker, an Austrian illustrator who uses limited colour to great effect. I really enjoy looking at examples like this. Using one bright colour in certain elements of the image is something I’ve recently been trying to get into my work. For the image below of Uncle Monty I chose to use bright yellow for the egg yolk as I thought it would stand out well against the sepia. I also thought a brown fried egg would look wrong so it simply had to be yellow. 

Michael Hacker

Michael Hacker

These experiments have been important to my progress because they have given me more confidence and less opportunity to worry about whether my colours look right.