Color and Play

There are two facets to learning how to work with color:

• Studying color theory (I recommend James Gurney's book Color and Light).

• Playing with color with no planned content.

Doing the first will help you learn how to really see the colors around you. Like most perception, how we understand color is affected by how we think about it and what we expect to encounter.

The best way to eradicate any bias is through gaining information (in this case reading color theory explained by an expert) and shifting from an anticipatory engagement with the world to a perceptual engagement. Our simple little human brains really like pattern sorting and anticipation of future patterns (this is why people become gambling addicts and why dopamine plays such a massive role in this type of addiction. For more info, I recommend checking out the Radiolab episode about stochasticity, available here.). It takes practice to see what is rather than anticipate what might be.

Playing with color is easy: just make a big ole field of color and see how it works out. I like to do this on journal pages and then write on them or find a splotch and turn it into something. This is just play. It’s not going anywhere. It’s not doing anything fancy. It’s just fun. And it lets me figure out how different color combos work together.

I also really like digital work for color play. Digital is nice because you don’t have to pay for all the fancy paints; you have infinite colors on hand. I do most of my playful drawing on my phone because it’s always around (it has a stylus). I do almost all of my serious illustration style work using a Wacom and Corel Painter.