Useful Tip: A simple way to evaluate colour accurately

Yesterday Gayle Mason provided a very useful tip on her blog "Fur in the Paint" about how to evaluate colour while developing her realistic portraits of dogs and cats.

It needs to be be said that she arrived at the "Useful Tip" after some trial and error - she passes quickly over some and refuses to come clean on others

While drawing a Rough Collie in pastel I have been known to take the painting and hold my own Collies fur against the board. Now nice tempered though my dogs are, this does not come on their list of 'what shall we do today'. They usually struggle which results in the said fur being left all over the painting. All I will say in conclusion is be very careful how you try to remove dog fur from pastel

Now that's not the tip - that just explains one of the reasons for the title of her blog. This is her tip........

House Paint help with my New Cat

......on a recent visit to the local DIY store I spotted the answer to all my problems. There, sitting quietly in a display cabinet was a rainbow of colours, the paint sample cards.

I released several of these into my custody, then went back and obtained several more. The samples are free and looking at the amount thrown onto the floor the ones I took had moved onto a better life.

They are perfect, I punched a hole in the side of each colour and now I can place the little strip over whatever reference I'm using. This can be a photograph, or my dogs or the grass outside, the possibilities are endless.

Now wasn't that useful?

Gayle tells me they can also be used to help provide a baseline for making corrections to a scan in order to get the colour right in the resulting image.

Visit Gayle's blog to follow her development of a wonderful apricot coloured Norwegian Forest Cat called Shred that she is currently drawing.

If you've got a useful tip and would like me to highlight it as part of this occasional series on useful tips then please use the comments function to post a comment and a hyperlink.