PSA: A professor told me my color palettes were 'too safe'

He said my last collection looked like it was designed in a beige room, which stung but was true. I started pulling swatches from weird places, like a photo of rust on a dumpster behind my building in Philly. What's the most unexpected place you've found a color you used?

2 comments

2 Comments

wright.jesse2d ago

Oh man, that professor gave you the best advice. I got the same critique years ago. My game changer was the grocery store. The weird, waxy green of a bell pepper next to the purple of an eggplant. Or the specific grimy yellow of the floor tiles in an old subway station. It forces you to see color without any design rules in your head. That rust idea is perfect. It's all about training your eye to see palettes in the wild.

robert_roberts2d ago

Yeah, the grocery store thing is so true. My friend who paints told me he got stuck on a sky for weeks, and then he saw the exact blue he needed on a plastic tarp covering a stack of bricks at a gas station. He said it was this gross, faded color with oil stains in it, and it was perfect. It totally broke him out of just using "pretty" colors from a tube. I mean, the world is full of weird color combos if you just stop and look.