All The Pretty Colours

Lets Talk Colour Palettes!

Colour palettes, and art in colour generally, is something that has taken me a while to get comfortable with. For a long time, the majority of my art was in greyscale, and although I really wanted to start getting into more colour, it seemed really challenging.

This improved quite a lot when I discovered Coolors (no affiliation). It’s a brilliant website for generating colours, and I really do recommend giving it a try if you struggle.

I do know some colour theory, some from school, some from learning about it as I got more into my art. But I will admit that selecting a palette does not come easily for me, and I have no shame in using a tool to help with that.

The majority of my old colour work was created through Coolor inspired palettes. However, I then did a course on Risograph printing, which has led me down an entirely different path…

Risograph Printing

This isn’t a post on Risograph printing, so I won’t go into much detail, but in a nutshell it’s a form of digital screen printing. The printer will make stencils for each colour within the piece, and then print one layer over the top of another.

The course highlighted some aspects that need to be factored into a design to make it suitable or “riso” printing:

You work with a limited colour palette - 1-4 colours. There are only 30 or so different ink colours, so the pool to select from is limited as well.
Each colour needs to be on a separate layer. However, as the ink is translucent, you can use layering of colours one of top of each other to create blending and new colours. To replicate this on procreate, you set each layer to multiply.
The printer can change the opacity level of the ink. The course showed how you can take the main colour as 100% and then reduce by 10% a go until you get to 0%.

All of this made for a really different way of thinking about colour and use of colour.

The limited choice meant I had to think what colours worked well, but also blended together nicely to make new colours. There was also choices of neon colours and metallic colours, which led me to picking colours I wouldn’t normally work with (pink comes to mind here!).

The way the layers were separated and the blending mode used also created some really interesting effects.

Overall, I was enamoured, and in case you are interested, here is the final piece for the course:

Future Fluff!

Do you recognise it? If not, rude, get yo’self over to my **gallery** and don’t come back til you have looked at all of them!

A new era of colours

I loved this piece when I finished it, and one of the things I really loved was the colours. I instantly wanted to make more, and as you can tell from basically this entire website, I did!

But when I went to move onto other cats, I thought it would be fun to use slightly different colour palettes, and thus a new process of selecting colour palettes was born.

My current process

All my official Padlilly Art have pallets selected through the following process:

Gold and Black are always used - black because it is vital for all my shading really, and gold because I like how it looks, and hope to one day print with a metallic ink for those bits.

2. I then select one neon colour from the risograph inks available at my local riso printer. Whilst I have yet to actually print on riso (it only becomes cost effective at 50+ prints, and I am so not at a stage to cover that cost), I would like to keep the option open. Also, using neon is really fun, and I find it easier to select from a restricted colour set!

3. I select my final non metallic, non neon colour, again from the riso ink choices. This takes the most time, as I need to see how the blend with the neon colour, and what further colour options I can create by combining. I have a really neat tool that was provided with the course that allows me to see how colours look blended together, for example see the pink and teal combo below:

And that will give me my four colour palette! For example, my main colour palette is this:

et Voila!

So there you have it! My colour palette process. So far I have three that I am working with, my main colour palette above, then one for my sister’s cats, and one for my parent’s cats. It’s nice to have the variety to play with, but I do love my main one the most. I expect I will create some more as time goes on, and who knows, maybe I will revent back to my old method, or try a new one in the future!

But for now, I am happy, and enjoy working with them. And I hope you enjoyed learning about it!

Au revoir for now!