Colour Workshop with Silvy Strand

Today we had a guest lecturer in the 2D-course, freelance illustrator Silvy Strand. She started with a lecture on what it is like to work as a freelancer and gave some good tips on what you need to think of when starting a buisiness. Then she demonstrated two approaches to colouring a drawing and let us have a go at it. One of the techniques was one that I am more familiar with, blocking in the colours and then add shadows and highlights.

The other one was to start building the values in black and white and then putting a colour layer on top of it. This is a technique that I have come across before but never really appreciated as I feel it easily looks dirty and amateurish. The colours do not come to life as they would if they were painted "from scratch". I decided to give this one a go anyways after discussing with Silvy and I think that it turned out better than I thought it would. I still feel that it shows that its been painted on top of another but considering that it is the first time and the short amount of time put into it, it turned out well.

I believe colour is probably not my strongest point yet, I do know the basic theory but I find it very difficult choosing the right colours and getting them to go together as I see it in my head. Silvy was very helpful as I had some difficulties getting started, she told me a good way is to start with colouring the entire image with the general colour of the background and then the light sources. In my case it is a forest in moonlight, meaning a desaturated, dark blue-green. It felt very obvious as she told me this and it got a lot easier to pick up from there.

Here is how it turned out...

and here is a closeup.