Limited Palette Dry Brush
- dry brush
- spot colour painting
- scumbled
- three colour painting
Three or four colours only, laid with a nearly dry brush so every edge breaks up.
Opens an image model with the prompt in it. The price is on the page before you sign in.
What it is for
Restricting the palette to three or four colours forces every decision into shape and placement rather than into hue, and a dry brush makes every edge an accident. The combination is deliberate design carried on an undisciplined surface, which is why it feels alive.
How it works
Three or four colours, used flat, never mixed into each other. The brush carries little paint, so each stroke breaks into speckle at its edges and skips across the surface. Colour crosses the boundaries of the drawing. Bare areas are left where the brush missed.
When to use it
Use it for posters, covers and anything that should look printed and handmade at once. Avoid it for clarity at small sizes, because a broken edge falls apart.
Told apart from its neighbours
Soft Pastel is dry pigment on paper tooth rather than paint on a brush. Screenprint Pop in the print catalogue is the same palette discipline with clean registration. Gouache Flat lays the same colours evenly.
- Soft Pastel
- Screenprint Pop
- Gouache Flat
Where it is used
It suits a poster, an album cover, an editorial illustration and any picture that should look made rather than rendered.
- Poster and editorial illustration
- Book covers and album art
The prompt
Replace the blanks with your own character, keep the rest. Then run it on an image model.
<character> painted with a dry brush in a limited palette, three or four flat colours only with no blending between them and no colour mixed from the others, every stroke laid with a nearly dry brush so the edges break up into scattered speckle rather than ending cleanly, colour deliberately escaping the drawing and running past the form into the background, areas left bare where the brush skipped, hard confident shapes underneath the broken surface
What goes wrong
A clean flat illustration comes back in three colours. Ask for the brush to be nearly dry, the edges to break into speckle, and the colour to run past the form.
Leave out
blended gradients, a full palette, clean edges, colour staying inside the lines, soft airbrush, smooth fills
Watch for
Let the colour escape. Keeping each colour inside its shape turns this into flat illustration, and the spill past the form is what makes it read as painted.
Questions
Draw it
Pay for the one run. No subscription, and the price is on the model page before you sign in.
