I’m In My Colour Era

Art is about experimentation and recently colour has been my experimental medium.

I don't try to shy away from it, on the contrary, I have favourite colours and want to include them in my pieces but my style doesn't often give me that luxury, besides the odd change of line colour, it's a one colour kind of style.

I have quite a few projects going on right now but, despite my busyness, I'm feeling restless, I want to do something different, even though none of it is helping me cut down my to-do list, it's been fun to create different things.

This piece was a learning experience, I first chose a skin tone and then added the pink background, the skin tone changed slightly with the added pink tone coming through and suddenly it looked good, it was alive, it was skin. It was absolutely an accident but colour is difficult to get right, something can look okay without being good and that was the case before the pink was added. Besides that, the shadows, usually black to match the line work, is a dark brown at 33% opacity. I first used greys for this but recently I've found brown to be a superior shadow colour.

This one is my second attempt at the same style. A slightly different pink background, this skin tone began as a colour picked duplicate of the first accidental favourite, the pink added behind it again gave it a warmth and a unique feel. In all honesty, I don't like this one as much, the hair doesn't work in my opinion and the whole thing feels flat. It's a fine piece of work, I'm okay putting it out into the world, but I don't like it as much as my first try.

To compare the two, the first was an organic piece created out of trial and error, the second did not rely on that, shortcuts were taken with the colours and although you can't tell, the soul of it definitely seems absent to me.

Bath Celebration, as I've come to call this piece is, for me, one of my best works. It's detailed yet fluid, it's sketchy, bright, and constructed well. The colours work together and the pose was perfect. For this, the pose inspired the art, I have a lot of people wanting to get drawn by me but so few poses that could have worked for this, which is why working on pieces like this is probably going to be hard and these pieces few and far between.

The second piece I did in this style works too, the pose has less movement but the colours are impactful and the sketchiness of the plants works especially well. Like the two pieces this article begins with, the first in better than the second but this one shares a spirit with the blue and yellow one, they're more in line and I enjoy looking at both.

I hope to continue experimenting in both of these styles, the sketchy nature of these two is often the first thing to go as one gets familiar with a new style but that in already on my radar and hopefully with that knowledge, I won't overwork it.

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