How I pick a color palette 🎨🙇‍♂️ + new illustration (Patreon)

Hello Patrons ! 🥰

These days I feel like I want to paint everything, all the time - it's probably because I have been in an art block for a few weeks.
I thought everything I drew was not interesting enough. I put too much pressure on myself sometimes ! Making art is supposed to be fun.
Instagram's algorithm didn't spare my account and my recent posts got the same number of likes as they did back in 2017, which hurts and made me a little sad I guess.

But I find myself being more creative and relaxed these days, which has been super nice !!
I have decided not to care about stats anymore, I just want to do my thing and enjoy the process.
And here's how I came up with these different color palettes I thought I'd share with you !

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I saw this beautiful picture of Selena Gomez a few days ago and saved it on Instagram. The shape of these sleeves ?? Oh my god ! 💘 

How I pick a color palette

I love playing with colors, and I think it's even more interesting when I only use just a few. My favorite combo is a warm color and a cold color (ex : red and blue).
Creating contrasts is so fun to me ! Darker colors also add depth to a piece, which could be useful if you feel like your piece is too flat. 

In a few words, my go to color palette has to have a combo of two colors to create a contrast, some kind of white to highlight some details, and a darker color to balance the whole palette :

Here the color combo is ash green and orange, the "white" is eggshell white, and the darker colors are reds, browns and of course, black.

The possibilities are endless and I think creating different color palettes for one drawing is a great exercise to awaken your creativity !

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PALETTE 1
I started sketching on my iPad, and this is the first color palette I came up with - dark red against an ash green background (the example I gave you above).
I have been wanting to draw red or blue tattoos on a character for so long - I picked red for this version because it goes better against her dark skin.
I like the mood, the warm tones in the foreground (reds and browns), and the cooler tone of the background. I also added a little cloud to break the darkness of this palette (ended up keeping the clouds in all 4 versions of this illustration though !).

PALETTE 2
For the second one, I switched the color combo - peach (warm color) for the background and blue (cold color) for her dress (kept the same colors for her hair and skin).

PALETTE 3
This one came out a little different - because her skin is lighter (and pink), this version has a cooler feel to it. Blue grey background (cold), red dress (warm). The cloud here is darker than her skin, which make her stand out more (just like the dark skin of the 2 others stand out more on a white cloud). Here I switched the color of her tattoos to blue - the tattoos pop even more on her pale skin.

PALETTE 4
And finally ! My favorite. I thought I'd make a night version of this little sketch. I used black for her dress because I just love the shape of the sleeves in all black. Not adding details to the dress also  make more room for the character's tattoos. Once again, I used a dark blue (cold) for the background, and orange and browns (warm) for the character. I mixed blues and oranges to add a little something to the cloud, some stars here and there - and I feel like this version is telling more about the character than the other 3. Not sure why, but I'm guessing it's just the night that brings out a certain loneliness in this piece.

The 4 color palettes side by side :

These are basically all the same color palettes ! You can do so much with 2 tones, black and white.
Which one is your favorite ?

I painted the night version yesterday :

I'm kinda tempted to paint all of them 🙇‍♂️

That's it for today ! I am not the best at tutorials/explaining things ! But I hope this post was helpful somehow ! 🥰 

Thanks again for your support on Patreon ! You're the best !! 💘

Hugs,

Sibylline