I’ve been playing with color recently. The funny thing about color is it’s surprisingly relative. Take purple for example: if you place a purple on a blue background, it will look like red-violet; if you place the same purple on a red background; it will look blue-violet. Context is everything with color.
A related concept is the idea that, given any 3 distinct colors, you can create a color triad that behaves like the 3 primaries. That is, one color will play the role of red, another of yellow, another of blue. I say “play the role of” because you may not have a color that comes anywhere approaching red or blue or yellow in the traditional sense. Regardless, blending the 3 colors will create a cohesive color pallet for any given work. At least, that’s the theory. The trick is to test it out.
So I decided to have some fun. I got out my box of Crayola pencils, closed my eyes, and pulled 3 colors at random. The results were mahogany, harvest gold, and slate grey. Granted, this is a very easy color pallet; mahogany is clearly red, harvest gold is yellow, and slate grey skews blue by nature. The weather had just begun to turn fall-ish, and this earth-tone triad demanded to be turned into leaves.
I grabbed my old pack of Color-Aid, found the nearest color matches I had to my pencils, and planned a design of overlapping leaves. The composition is asymmetric to evoke the randomness of a forest floor. The leaf shapes are simple and repetitive so as not to distract from the real star of the show: the color illusion.
Fall Leaves - Color-Aid paper and pen on illustration board
No two overlapping leaves are the same color. At their intersections appear slices of secondary color - olive green, rusty-brown, and red-violet - carefully selected from the Color-Aid pack to be the most sensible blend between the leaves. To be clear, not a single piece of plastic, tissue paper, or other transparent material is present here (aside from the glue, perhaps). The whole thing is carefully cut paper fragments. Seven colors in all.
There is a thrill to pieces that involve a sleight-of-hand. It’s that moment where the audience pauses and asks, “How did you do that?” or “What is this made of?” and is genuinely surprised by the answer. There is also a special joy to paper projects; they are somehow more tangible and hands-on than drawings and have the extra 3rd Dimension of the paper layers. I may stay on this tangent for a bit longer. There are 3 more seasons to represent, after all.