For those who saw this picture beginning a month ago, here’s where I’m up to…
In the city of bears.
This greeny-blue seems to be a colour that automatically comes out of my brush these days. I think because I’m using touches of red in so much of my work at the moment – the green is a perfect foil. Think of it like the yin-yang symbol – to really see how dark something is you need light beside it. To see how light something is you need a dark to define it. To show a hot red you want coolness around it. Ever noticed how the flaming autumn colours look even brighter and hotter when there is still a few touches of green on the tree?
This green is cool, but not cold. You wouldn’t believe how much thought goes into subtle variations in colour. A tiny touch of lemon in a colour might make it cold, yet indian yellow would make it warm. It’s barely perceptible but the emotional reaction to the piece can be totally different. This is why illustrators need to see proofs before a book goes to final press. When you’re telling a story, generating the desired emotional response is essential and colour is an enormous part of that. When work is scanned, the colours are often altered slightly and what I usually find is that warm tints become cooler.
Look at the difference between these ones…
One is warm, secure and inviting. The other makes me think that it’s a cold winter morning. The storytelling that’s going on and the feeling that’s created, is so different. It’s the moments that we create in our pictures that I love. Some of it is what’s going on physically in the set-up, the arrangement of elements, the relationships between things. But for me, I just love that colour and light. Like smells, colours take me back to firelit evenings when I was a kid, to summer at the beach, to winter mornings when the wind moaned mournfully around the house and the colour of my favourite dress when I was four.
Where did that all start? Green. I think it’s my new purple. Not that I’ll be changing my hair. I don’t want to be personally verdant.
