By Yasodhara Pathanjali
Good day readers! How was your week? Did you do anything fun? Did you join us on Friday for the live session and draw something with me? Don’t forget to email your drawings to me so that I can include them here in the paper.
Today, we are going to talk about colour. How do you usually choose colours for a drawing? If you’ve done the sketch and want to colour the drawing, how do you know what colours should go where? Most of the time, colours are chosen because we think that it’s the “right” colour – the colour the object is in real life. So if you’ve drawn a tree, you would choose browns for the trunk and greens for the leaves. If you’ve drawn a landscape, blues for the sky and water, and browns and greens for the ground and foliage. It may seem as simple as that.
But the reality is that anything can be any colour. Leaves can be purple, red, yellow, or grey. The sky can be orange, green, or white. As I said a few weeks ago, a cow can be purple or pink or blue! It is completely up to you. What’s on your paper is your own world you are creating – a world that can look a bit like ours but is still entirely your own creation. So in that world, it’s you that gets to decide what colour things are, even if they don’t make sense to others. Even if the colours are not what we normally see on the same things in our world.
This coming Friday, I will do the live show on the Little Stars – The Sunday Morning Facebook page where we will draw different things, animals, plants, and even people and we will explore all the funky colours that we could use. So bring your coloured pencils, crayons, and watercolours and join me on Friday at 4 p.m.
Thank you to all my lovely readers for sending me your beautiful drawings over the last few weeks. We love seeing all your amazing talent and can’t wait to see more of your great work. Here are two that I wanted to discuss, so that I can give feedback.
Arwa
This is a really beautiful and unusual drawing. You have used so much texture in this piece that you can almost feel that it is a real moving scene. I think that you can really expand on this style, try out different colours, strange colours (like we’ve talked about today). See if you can also use the same technique to paint other scenes, particularly ones that include the sea, rivers, etc. This really is amazing, so keep going.
Kisal
You’ve really captured a mood and a depth here that you should definitely explore. This painting really looks like a forest where you could go exploring. Also, the use of colour creates a misty, early morning mysterious feel. Have you learned how to create depth in drawings so that you can make this even better? Your soft and undefined style is really nice; try more colours, different scenes, and see what works for you. The more you experiment the better you will be.
Kisal
You’ve really captured a mood and a depth here that you should definitely explore. This painting really looks like a forest where you could go exploring. Also, the use of colour creates a misty, early morning mysterious feel. Have you learned how to create depth in drawings so that you can make this even better? Your soft and undefined style is really nice; try more colours, different scenes, and see what works for you. The more you experiment the better you will be.