Notes on color and the habits of illustrators.
Short essays, workflows, and references for anyone who cares about the colors they choose.
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Indigo isn't one color: four centuries hiding in a single hex
Your color picker's indigo is Newton's musical placeholder, not Indigofera, not denim, not aizome. A walk through four very different blues that share one hex, and the practical move for illustrators.
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Monet painted Rouen Cathedral thirty times. The cathedral wasn't the subject.
In the winter of 1892 Monet rented a room across from Rouen Cathedral and painted the same stone under thirty lights. It was the most disciplined color study in painting history. How to run the exercise in ten canvases.
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Near-black is not black: why your darks look dead
Pure black is the most common color mistake in digital illustration. Why painters never used it, and five ways to mix a dark that actually lives in your palette.
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The palettes you loved last week
Illustrators lose their best palettes because they treat them as disposable. A case for keeping a palette library, and three rules that make it stick.
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Procreate's color picker is great, until it isn't
Procreate's color tools are genuinely good, and they hit a wall when your work cares about palette continuity. Three places it falls short, and what to do about it.
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Steal a palette from any movie still in 60 seconds
The single highest-leverage practice for improving your color eye: pull a four-color palette from a movie frame in under a minute. Here's the process.
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What Sargent, Hopper, and Klimt teach about restraint with color
Three painters, three kinds of restraint. A working lesson for illustrators on deciding the architecture of color before the colors themselves.