How Colour Palette Can Define Your Artistic Voice

While artistic voice emerges, often subconsciously, over time, you can also take some deliberate and planned steps to harmonize your voice. A frequently underutilized tool for defining your artistic voice is creating a signature colour palette for your work. Many illustrators use repeated hues, saturation levels, contrast levels and other colour-based techniques to define their work to great success.

Aspects of Colour

As you begin to think about colour palettes in your work, it’s helpful to remember all the different aspects of colour that can be deliberately manipulated.

Hue describes the precise colour, such as cobalt blue or mars black. It can also be described by CMYK codes (in print) or RGB and hexadecimal codes in digital spaces. CMYK codes might look like 0/100/100/0 for a bright, crimson red. RGB codes would be 255, 0, 0 for a bright, crimson red. And the hex code is #FF0000. All these codes and words actually describe the same colour, although RGB overall has the largest spectrum available. Read more about that in my post on printing tips and tricks.

Saturation describes the amount of pigment in a colour. A more saturated colour has less white or black in it and more is therefore more vibrant.

Value describes the lightness or darkness of a colour. If you have trouble seeing value differences in colour, try changing the image to greyscale to make it much more clear.

Contrast describes the differences between the highest and lowest value in an image. An image with a big differences between the highest and lowest value would be considered high contrast. A good example is the technique of chiaroscuro.

Temperature describes the warmness of coolness of a colour. The warm side of the colour wheel includes reds, oranges and yellows while the cool side is blues, greens and purples. However, each primary and secondary can be warm or cool, for example carmine would be a cool red paint while vermillion would be a warm red.

Define Your Colour Palette

With so many aspects of colour to play with, it’s a good idea to focus only on one or two to create a defining artistic voice.

For example, take illustrator Tara Mcpherson. Her artwork often includes pink and turquoise greens, to the point it has become a defining feature of her work.

Stellar Revolution Midnight by Tara McPherson demonstrates her iconic pink and turquoise palette

Another great example is the artist Adrian Tomine, who has a low saturation and low contrast colour palette that makes his work instantly recognizable.

Only Son DVD cover by Adrian Tomine showcases a muted image with subtle shading, iconic of Tomine’s work

So how about it - is there an aspect of colour that you like to play with in your work? Thinking about leaning into it and embracing it as part of your artistic voice is a great opportunity to build a signature style.