Sep 9th, 2024

Author: donich_admin

Searching for a colour

As you will have gathered, we have three cats that I like to draw. Or at least, I am not that good at drawing (although I am trying to learn), and I am also a bit impatient, so I have been doing some rather cartoon like children’s’ illustration of them.

But I thought I would try to do a full on art work of Saphy (using watercolour pencils and inks) , and ran into one problem. None of my basic watercolour pencils would do anything like a “Saphy” colour – she is a tabby and a mix of very dark brown and another colour which I am going to describe as dark taupe. This is Saphy.

This is a close up of her fur. The colour I am having trouble with is her general “background colour”. So I had to resort to underhand means. I opened her photo in paint.net (you could use any graphics package but this one is good and free), and used the colour selector to sample her colours. From this I got her colours to be

Light R157 B151 G119
Dark R9 B8 R4 (this one is so near to black that I will just use black for it).

I then looked at the colour chart that came with my 120 set of Castle watercolour pencils. They do not supply colour codes with them, and apparently this is common practice by paint manufacturers – something to do with how paint appears on paper. So I scanned in the colour chart that came with the pencils – no luck again, none of them seemed anything like Saphy.

So, I printed out a block of what is exactly R157 B151 G119, took it to my craft bench and tried the pencils one at a time. None of the pencils I had been trying (various shades of brown) worked at all. And then more or less as a last resort, I looked at some greens. Believe it or not, the closest colour is in fact “Earth Green”.

I’ll need to see what the painting using this works out as, but for future reference the technique was useful.