Colour Palette Swap! A creative collaboration

Emma and Raj draw outside their 'comfort palettes’

When me and Raj spoke about a creative collaboration, the one idea that got us REALLY excited was exploring our approaches to colour. As artists, we use colour in very different ways, Raj is bold and fearless with her use of colour, but also considers her palettes very carefully. I’m self confessed ‘colour-phobe’ and tend to stay safe with my choices, preferring natural or muted colours, or a small amount of one bold colour, offset with monotones.

One thing I’ve learnt during my creative development over the past three years is how important it is to push yourself out of your comfort zone if you want to see your work evolve and improve. However, I’ve been shying away from experimenting with colour for fear of making mistakes, so this collaboration was going to be both a challenge and a huge learning opportunity for me.

I couldn't be more thrilled to be working with Raj on this. Her playful and experimental approach to her creative practice has always been a source of inspiration to me, and I'm excited to learn from our different approaches to using colour.

Emma

I am obsessed with colour, and have always been drawn to work that does not shy away from the brights, the loud and extrovert colour palettes. However, what I have come to learn is that working with vibrant colours really well is tough, because in order for the vibrant colours to really sing, they need their muted and deep tones as friends to support and hold them. Often, we know what we are drawn to with colour, but we find it really hard to understand how to bring what we love into our own work. My mission this year is to really give my colour practice time and attention with focussed, bite sized exercises, that allow me to dive deeper into understanding colour. I do this with my monthly colour sessions, which are pre-recorded sessions for my paid subscribers to work along to with me.

This month, I wanted to get inspired by Emma’s approach to colour. Although she calls herself a ‘colour-phobe’, actually she has a very sensitive and delicate approach to colour, rooted in a deep love of nature inspired palettes. I wanted to bring some of this sensitivity into my practice, and to be more careful and considered about where the vibrant tones fit in. Asking another artist to GIVE you a palette to work with is a brilliant way to dive into an unfamiliar palette. The challenge and the time we spent together working on our images was so much fun, and I loved seeing our work, side by side at the end!

Raj

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The Challenge:

The challenge was to try out unfamiliar colours in our drawings, to push ourselves out of our comfort zones.

We assigned one another a colour palette, agreed on the reference material to work from, decided we could work in any medium we wanted to, and we were off!

What you’ll see:

• Time lapse process video

• Colour breakdown of the colour palettes and materials used

• References used

• Final drawings

• Key learnings for each of us