More colour tests

I started to think about the colour palette for the book, as I was really impressed with the book I researched in the beginning of this unit, The star in the forest by Helen Kellock.

Although I don’t want to make my book as limited as that in colour, there are points that I would like to incorporate into my book, and some hints and tips that I can pull from Helens book colours, which would make my book look more cohesive and less busy.

Helen has used a bright pink colour in small doses through every page as an accent colour, but she has used it to focus the eye on a particular thing or area, and I think this trick would work really well within my story and illustrations/ colour palette.

I also like the fact that she has used the yellow and white colours to show light throughout the book illustrations, again I think this could work well within my book as making a glow around Flora, and as she is a tiny cracker this will help to see her on the page, among lots of foliage and flowers.

You can see below my colour test sheet, working out what colours the characters should be in, the broken garden and the palette for that, as well as the restored grown garden.

Then you can see at the bottom how I have decided on some colours and not others to limit the overall palette.

This is still a work in progress, but it has helped me to condense them down already, and hopefully won’t look as busy as it could have done originally!

I then went on to paint in a rough of one of the pages of the restored grown garden, to see how fresh and vibrant I could get the garden to look. This is also not a finished palette, but it gave me a better idea of how the colours work together and how they would also work with the surface pattern design, and digital brushes.

Making the painted background more muted and pastel could be the way forward, to create a base for the other textures on the top.