This is a bit of a random post, but while I was working on a poster commission recently, I got a little overwhelmed with picking a color palette that was harmonious while still suiting the project. I ended up using coolors.co to help generate some possible ideas. Since then I’ve also created a whole bunch by color picking from previous illustrations of mine, it was interesting to see what color families I tend to favor! Lots of ruddy earths, turquoises, mosses and olives, peaches, dusty roses, and lavenders and lilacs. I seem to avoid strident blues even though they’re growing on me recently, but I always love powdery soft ones or if they’re dark and moody like Indanthrone or a bluish Payne’s Gray.

A lot of them are taken from marker drawings, and since I have some go-to colors there’s some overlap but still nice variation. Some are from watercolor or colored ink, and some pure digital. I thought I’d share them here just because they’re pretty. If you’re looking for some color inspo for your own art, maybe they’ll come in handy?

A number of them are from art of characters from my stories or TTRPG campaigns. The color names seemed almost fitting for them a lot of the time! Or else, they gave me some neat ideas for fleshing them out even further whenever I get back to writing. It’s kind of interesting that the more I draw and paint, the more I tend to go with what feel like “traditional” color palettes even in digital art. It seems so much easier to create harmonious schemes when you’re using and blending limited colors, as though you have a select handful of paint tubes in front of you and not a 16,777,216-color digital RGB picker :p

Anyway, I’ve collected a ton of resources, links, inspiration files, and materials on my computer over the years of learning how to draw and paint. Some of them might make for more totally random posts like this one, but I want to finally start sharing them instead of hoarding them all to myself.

Cheers, and I hope you’re having a great week!