Color theory for colorists: five ideas for every page
Pick five colors, plan where the lights and darks go, warm the front and cool the back, keep one color loud and mix your own grays. That’s most of the color theory a page needs.
Color theory tends to arrive as a school subject, all wheels and words like tertiary. Most of it can stay in the textbook. Five ideas from all that theory are worth bringing to every page you color, once the dishes are done and the evening is yours, and if you keep only one, make it the first.
1. Use five colors on a page
The most common difference between a page that looks like a picture and one that looks like a paint chart is how many colors are on it. A box of forty-eight pencils is a lovely thing to own. You don't need all forty-eight on one bowl of fruit.
Next time, choose five before you start. Two that sit near each other on the wheel, say a warm red and an orange. One from across the wheel, a blue-green. Then two quiet near-neutrals, a warm gray and a cream. Color the whole page with those, and when you want a color you haven't got, layer two of the five to make it. The warm red laid lightly over the blue-green gives a dusky purple-brown, the color of a ripe fig. The page will hang together, and you'll notice it the moment you zoom out.
Those five are the page's own suggested set. Every page in PencilDrop comes with colors drawn from its subject, and we've made named palettes for other moods. Start from the suggested set and swap one color, two at most.
This works just as well with tap to fill, on a page you want done in ten minutes. Five colors, one tap per shape, and it already looks planned.
2. Plan where the light and dark go
Squint at a finished page until the colors blur. What's left is a pattern of light and dark, which painters call value, and your eye reads it before it notices a single hue. Lovely colors with no plan for light and dark tend to look flat, and most colorists have a few of those pages tucked away.
So decide early where the light is coming from, before the first stroke if you can. Keep the lightest lights and the darkest darks for the thing you want people to look at, and let everything else sit in the middle.
Take the color away and the difference is obvious. The every-color page goes to one even gray. The five-color page keeps its dark pomegranates and figs against a pale bowl, and that pattern is most of why it reads as fruit in a bowl. To check your own page, take a screenshot and drag the saturation all the way down in Photos.
3. Warm colors come forward, cool colors sit back
A cadmium orange looks nearer than a cobalt blue on the same sheet of paper, and that's enough to build depth into a flat drawing: warm the foreground, cool the background. It works on a mandala too. Color the outer rings in cool blue-violets and the center in hot rose and cadmium yellow, and the middle seems to rise toward you.
4. Keep one color loud, and keep it small
When every shape is bright, nothing stands out. Pick one color to be the brightest, most saturated thing on the page and give it a small area. On the lighthouse below it's the red dome, a patch you could hide under a thumbnail, and it's where your eye goes first.
Put that color down last, once you know where you want people to look.
5. Mix your own grays and browns
People new to coloring tend to skip gray and brown. Working artists use them constantly, because a colored gray makes the bright colors next to it look brighter. You make one by layering two opposites lightly, a blue over an orange, or ultramarine over burnt sienna if you think in paint. Press harder with the blue and it cools, harder with the orange and it warms. Either way it has more life in it than a gray pencil from the box.
When a page starts to feel garish, try a quieter color beside the loudest one before you change anything else.
Trying it on today's page
Everyone gets the same page each day, so it's a good place to try one idea at a time, and when you judge, you see what other people did with the same shapes. Start with the first. Before you touch tonight's page, choose your five, and when you want a sixth, layer two of them. Tomorrow, decide where the light comes from before you pick a color.
The other forty-three pencils can stay in the box. They'll cope.
These are our own examples of what a page can become, each colored to a written color plan. They aren’t competition entries.
