The 3 Pain Points of Colour for Illustrators

What Gets Us Most Stuck When Using Colour?

Colour seems to come easy for some illustrators. For everyone else, it’s one of the stickiest sticking points in our process! While each experiences colour in their own way, I find that illustrators struggle in three key areas:choice, consistency, and confidence. I call these the 3 Pain Points of Colour.

Choice

There are millions of colours in the physical world. While I don’t know if they have been quantified, I have learned that the human eye is capable of seeing around 10 million of them. Our digital devices, on the other hand, offer us 16.7 million. That’s about 7 million more than we need—just in case, I suppose.

All of this to say: we have a lot of possibilities to sort through. Most of the time, we need only a handful of colours in our art. How to choose from the many?

We can overcome our struggle with infinite choice by setting constraints in our work.

Easy, you might say. Just use the colour wheel and pick from these. That leaves us 12 on the traditional model, with the three primaries of red, yellow and blue; the three secondaries of orange, green and violet, and then those in between (red-orange…