Just as important as finding the right words for a story, finding the right colours for a book takes a lot of consideration.
Colour of course is only one of the many things that make the pictures in a book both interesting and pleasing. Colour sets the mood for the book. It sets the ‘feel’ that the author and illustrator want the reader to experience. Colours also move the eye through the book.
I have a lot of colours to chose from, and yet I have to narrow it down to just a few. That’s not to say you could use as many as you want for, lets say, a garden of many flowers or people with different cloths. Of course that would be ok. But I have found that a few well chosen colours can tell a visual story much better, at least for me.
For this new book I need to paint a goldfish pond. I’ve chosen mainly greens: for lily pads, for the water looking down into the pond, and for the frogs. But goldfish are anything but green, and yet even though they are very orange, they have to fit to the picture. And of course what is a pond without a water lily. This one is white. But every artist knows there is no pure white in nature.
The last problem that has to be solved is how my paints get along, not as colours, but as chemicals. It’s true that some of my colours are really just dirt, but others are chemicals, and they don’t always get along. Combinations which should be simple can be disasters since they just don’t want to mix. Or they don’t like being put on top of each other; pulling the bottom colour off the paper even if it’s dry.
So you see, choosing the colours for a picture book is both fun and a bit of work. And for that reason you can see there are many tests and tries just to get it right even before I start the actual pictures that will end up in the book.
