Ceci n'est pas une peinture

A good friend noticed recently that my palette was evolving, and I was so glad she noticed!

I pick colors the way you pick fruit. Here and there, wondering how that pink will do with yellow...These days I work with the colors I don't like, or hated at some point. That mandatory pink I hated as a little girl, the hard blues of the eighties, that ugly blue green and yellow that were so fashionable when I moved in SF. I put them all together and tried to mix and work until I came with something I liked...here we are, some yellows and pink and blue to work with. 

This is not a painting, it's just a palette of colors!

Une amie remarquait récemment que ma palette évolue, cela m'a beaucoup touchée...J'y travaillais justement! Ceci n'est pas une peinture, c'est une palette.

Bleu dur, corail trop vif, jaune trop jaune et vert trop bleu...Toutes couleurs que je déteste, le pire étant ce rose dont on insistait à me parer petite parce que j'étais la seule fille et que les affaires de maman étaient bleues. Je me souviens d'une robe rose en laine, adorable,  mais le tissus était rugueux... Pour moi le rose, ça gratte, ça n'est pas une couleur facile.
Il manque le fuchsia terrible de cette doudoune de très bonne qualité qui a duré des années, misère...Mais je crois que nous sommes sur le point de nous réconcilier. Parfois je m'empare d'une palette  et je mélange jusqu'à ce que des harmonies se détachent. Voila un vert, un bleu que je vais pouvoir intégrer dans ma palette.
Tiens, voilà un rose qui donnera bonne mine à mes jaunes.  Il faut se méfier des couleurs qu'on déteste, elles sont parfois les notes qui manquent à une harmonie qu'on aimera beaucoup. 

Couleur préféré, couleur détestée, les vôtres ont-elles une histoire?

On colors (4)

Find the whole series "On colors" here.

While the others posts of these series about colors were about how I studied colors, this one is about a quick fix I found to build palettes for illustrations. 

I don't have always the time to study whole cultures, history of art, or even fashion magazines. Thankfully, there is this new trend on the internet that I find fab.  
Colors  and palettes are now fashionable , yeah for design blogs!

A designer will take a picture he likes, analyze the color platte, and republish it with the colors on the bottom or side. While doing this poses a few copyrights problems ( proper authorizing is indeed needed), it's a gold mine for other designers.

Here I made an example from one of my pictures on my other blog "Spilt Milk", where I post my photos. It's one of the cute houses from my book "Mon Village", isn't it cute?

Anyway. So for me, thanks to these websites it's like 75% of the color job is done. It's glorious. I will browse design websites, make mood boards, study the new trends ,and make my own palettes out of it. 

You can find fabulous palettes on different websites, but my favorite includes:

Creature Comfort : the chicest.  Ez Pudewa has great taste, and her blog is an inspirational paradise.

Color Collective : a trendy designer resource. Lots of good ideas and delicate colors.

Rotten Cupcakes: I love that author July Mack included a notion of proportion in her palettes. 

Design Seed: the gigantic corpus of this website is searchable with RGB cursors. An amazing tool when you want to build palettes around this specific lime green or that adorable coral.

I don't take one palette and use it as is. Like I said, most of my illustrations have a palette of more than 4 or 5 colors. What I do is gather palettes that go together on a mood board. Finding 2 palettes that goes together is easy, 3 more difficult, finding  6 assorted palettes a real job. I gathered up to 14 to make a rich color panel. I combine them with old favorites that constitute a big part of my personal style, to bring a richer world of colors in my illustrations.

And then comes the hard work : painting!

Next time I will talk about fun apps and tools to create your own palettes.

On Colors (3)

Find the whole series "On colors" here.

Here is how I began to study colors with my very own approach. I needed something more practical than rules defined by others for other uses than mine. I needed to find the equivalent of mixing colors on a palette, and to go through my own culture and gathered corpus of lovely picture.

I took my iPad , and a few color apps. I used successfully Palettes Pro and Adobe® Color Lava for Photoshop® and tested some others ...I liked Palette Pro because it can extract colors from a picture, and Color Lava is fun because I can use the colors in Photoshop via Wifi. It's not really practical but real fun in a happy geeky way.

So what I did first is take my favorite pictures ever and extract the colors I loved.

Here is a lovely illustration by Boutet de Monvel on Adobe Color Lava. Boutet de Monvel was a very well known French children illustrator in the first part of the 20th century. I love his pictures since I was a little girl. So it was a good place to start! 
For months I analyzed loved pictures and discovered two important things:

1.That 5 colors is enough to make a picture, but usually not enough. Most of my illustrations have more than 5 colors . I had to combine palettes or add colors.

 

2. That color analysis app are great tools, but they don't give you the proportions to use. Like, if there is a large amount of red in a picture and very little blue and yellow, you will still extract samples the same size. I don't find  it helps me choosing colors. I learned to make moodboards instead of palettes, so I could get the inspiration I needed. Colors is about proportions, contrast and accents. Pinterest is a great tool for color hunting : see what I gathered here.

I also used the application moodboards on my iPad. 
Here is a sample I made for you, so you can get an idea : of course I don't use my own pictures usually.

 

Because colors depend on language a lot I also made research on color names in both my languages : corail, Kelly green, puce...I also learned that translation doesn't work so well: Khaki is not the same color in French and English. I began to translate colors in different languages to google them and get even more ideas.

This is how I learned more about colors and how I use them my way. But that's a lot of work and studying. I understand more and I am able to understand even more by association. It was a long and pleasant way and I am still working on it. Learning teaches you to be curious and make your own conclusions, and in a world of preprocessed foods and informations it's a very good thing. 

But I also came up with a good, fast way to create interesting palettes, and I will tell you more about it next time!

On colors (2)

Find the whole series "On colors" here.

I studied colors for a long time. Working on forensic reconstruction of the face of Ramses the Second, I learned how Egyptians used colors  3 thousand years ago. I was intrigued because they used two set of colors : one, very restricted, for sacred stuff, and an expanded one, where they mixed colors , for more casual pictures. (follow links for pictures)

I also knew that parietal paintings found in Lascaux had mostly four colors : white red earth and black. I don't think it's because they didn't have any other colors. I think it was mostly because of symbolic meanings. The same kind of meanings you will find in medieval pictures, in pojagi or ukiyo-e. The system of colors we use for road signals and logos are still respecting the medieval rules of colors created for coat of arms. Colors are deeply embed in our culture.

It is easy to get on the other side of the color perception and consider only symbols. Meanings and symbols generated glorious and simple, beautiful pictures. You can drape yourself in color meanings and enjoy it tremendously.

Clutched between science and symbols, Goethe and Newton make me quite nervous. Their work on color is the basis of most that we know now, but both of their work is tainted with approximation and affirmations with no scientific basis whatsoever.   

I studied  for a long time. I also studied the fact that we don't really see or integrate a color before  we have a name for it. Like there is very little quotes of about blue in Occident literature before the 13th century, when suddenly blue became a very trendy color indeed.  We ourselves thrive by trends, and words like turquoise, tangerine , coral and the multiple names of browns bring different palettes to our lives. Language is actually a big part of our color world.

Studying gave me only one certitude : there is scientific rules for color production...But there is none for color use. Unless you consider the part of art that is giving yourself rules about what you are doing ( ex: I will do this in a square. I will use bright colors. I will use only crayons...etc) there is absolutely no rules. There is taste. There is culture. There is fashion. That's it. You can follow, or not : you are free.

Pick something you like. Work with colors you love. Chose your own rules. And break them too.

I remember that brown and navy blue together were out of question for me. I mix them happily now. I wouldn't squirm on an orange and khaki and pink picture now, but 20 years ago I would have found that disgusting. And I would be sorely disappointed now by the colors of my living room in 1992 : cream, grey-blue and pine wood, which I used to love to bits. 

So I took another approach.

(to be continued)

On Colors

Find the whole series "On colors" here.

My dear  friend Lisa was wondering the other day how I chose my colors. She knows I am very much interested in the subject. From science to perception to language, sociology, and culture, it's not a light subject.

Most people are very happy with complementary colors...And are half wrong because they don't use the right color wheel.  Like, in the real world of perception, the complementary of blue is yellow, and red is turquoise. But whatever, because what is important is actually contrast and similar shades .

And then there is fashion (yes indeed for colors) and cultures . For example red is GOP here, socialist in France, and people live by the colors of their flags wherever they are. Except in Holland were they have another national color, orange...In bright lights like in LA people tend to like more vivid colors, in softer ones more subdued , like all shades of plums and grey in Paris , so you can't really define rules. Or you can define ones but they are very complicated. 

 

My grandmother Mamette explained me once a little trick : you put all your colors in a rainbow , chose 3 or more that stand close to each other, then one at the other side of the rainbow for accents. It always works. 

I do follow her advice . Then I added cultural palettes I met in my travels  and studies: the palette of the little pink  Battistero in Parma , red and pink combo seen in Japanese chiyogami, mix of yellow and fuchsia seen in Goa, the particularly delightful celadon green of the Pacific here when the sun backlit the waves...that kind of things. I created my very own palette, with my favorite blues, reds and greens, that worked together. It took me years!

But I realized recently that even if these were my favorite colors, and even if Mamette rules...I was still using the same colors, always . So I added colors from people I love : that lavender from Clo, this mustard yellow from Rachel, a bit of bright blue from my husband, green from my son...It's fun to think about them when I paint, but it's not enough, it's never enough.

So I took another step... I will post about it soon!

Pas de traduction...La dernière fois que j'ai posté à propos de couleurs, j'ai eu droit à plein de remarques très désagréables de la part de trolls Franchouillons qui ne savent pas que Newton a choisi 7 couleurs dans l'arc en ciel pour des raisons ésotériques ( c'est pas très scientifique ça), que Chevreul voulait surtout créer des teintes pour colorer du fil, que Itten est complètement dépassé et que la couleur est un problème de culture et de langage autant que de science. Si vous tenez absolument à expliquer à toute la planète que le vert est la complémentaire du rouge parceque c'est trop dur de remettre en question des règles difficilement acquises...Abstenez-vous de commenter et je ne sais pas moi...Allez regarder un feu rouge, fermez les yeux...Quelle couleur apparait?