Let's Talk Colours
One of the first questions couples ask me when they see me drawing at wedding fairs is whether I can work with other colour inks. There's an easy answer, and a more complicated answer.
The easy answer is yes, yes I can. Job's a good'un, you can stop reading here. But if you want to know a bit about the more complicated answer, keep reading.
When we're talking about colour palettes, there are four major factors that we need to take into consideration to make it work.
1. Consistency
If you want the pictures to be instantly recognisable as YOUR wedding art, you want all the drawings of the day to be made from the same palette. One of the reasons my drawings are such popular wedding favours with guests is because they’re not getting just a sketch of themselves, they’re taking home a piece of your wedding. All the artwork that I do throughout the day - the ceremony, the speeches, the first dance - is as much a part of your wedding as your dress, the flowers on the table, or even the rings. The drawings your guests take home belong to the wedding as much as the drawings of you sharing your first kiss, so you want them to look like they belong together.
I CAN bring all my colours and make sure that every gets an accurate representation of the coloured clothes they’re wearing on the day, and honestly, if that’s what you want, that’s what I’ll do, but my opinion is that it works better when there’s one unified palette that runs throughout the whole day.
2. Complexity
The more colours I use, the longer each picture will take. I think a good palette consists of no more than three colours - a base tone, a dark tone, and if you really want it, an accent colour to create a pop. I prefer to work with just two tones, as that allows me to balance speed and aesthetic, but it’s your day and I’ll work with as many colours as you want me to. I would say that every extra colour in the palette will slow me down by an extra minute - and as I add more colours into the mix, that extra time increases dues to needed to make more decisions and think a little more carefully about where I make the next mark.
So, if a two colour drawing is 2-3 minutes per person, a 3 colour drawing would be more like 3-4 minutes, and a 4 colour drawing might be more like 5-6 minutes per person. It’s doable, but we’ll take guest count into consideration when we’re deciding on palettes.
3. Cohesion
Some colours work better together than others. Your yellow and orange bouquets look gorgeous held against the midnight blue bridesmaids dresses, but on paper in ink, the colours will bleed together and we’re left with swamp green and sludge brown. Due to the speed at which I work, there’s normally not enough time to let one colour dry before adding another, so the inks can (and do) blend together in unexpected ways.
Even colours that should work together, sometimes just don’t. Blues tend to make people look like they’ve walked through the arctic without a jacket on, and greens make people look like they’re partying on choppy seas. And there’s the issue of the dark tones swamping the base tones - lilac with black is just black.
There’s always a way to make the colour palette work. Instead of a harsh black with the lilac ink, we can go with a rich, deep burgundy to create depth and warmth. We can do sage green and chocolate brown, with a bold sienna tone as an accent to make sure guests don’t look like they’re about to tell you to get out of their swamp.
4. Context
If you’re having a winter wedding, you might WANT the pictures to look a bit frosty. A summer wedding might want to have a gold tone base, to give a sunshine vibe. Black and red is a colour palette that says ‘I got married on Halloween’, whilst grey and burgundy can read more like ‘cigars in the library after supper’.
Each wedding has it’s own, unique personality, and the colour palette we choose - whether it’s based on the flowers, the season, or the venue - will capture something of the day.
So, while the easy answer to 'can you use different colours', is 'yes!' the complicated answer is 'yes, as long as the consistency, complexity, cohesion, and context are all considered'.