For the past year or so I’ve been hosting a monthly remote lifedrawing/other digital art exercise session with my team at work, and I wanted to share this one with y’all because I think it’s been a really important exercise for me over the years and my team really got a lot out of it too!

So there’s two pieces you need: a black and white reference, and an unrelated limited colour palette.

I’ve just been grabbing the reference off of pinterest, because we’re not doing anything with these except practicing so copyright doesn’t really apply. The color palettes can be created however you want, there’s definitely some great tools online, but these ones I made by using the color palette from image tool in Procreate. you dropped any image you have and then it will generate you one of these color palettes from it based on the color spread and the color frequency. it’s a really great quick way to grab limited palettes from images that inspire you!

Anyways, with both of those pieces in hand you can get to work creating a study of the image using only colours you’ve taken directly from the limited palette, or, if you’re feeling generous to yourself, mixed from the palette on screen.

It’s a bit of a mental stretch at first, but you will quickly start to find different vectors for your decision-making: are you using the colours to try and create a realistic image? or are you grouping them by value? does it make sense to try and assign warm and cool to light and shadow? or are there objects in the frame that would benefit from a strong local colour?

For me, it’s a decent digital version of a standard limited palette exercise I might do in watercolour our other traditional media, where I limit myself to a few paints or crayons or such. I did this exercise a lot with the full colour By Crom! comics, and it’s been great to bring it to my digital work.

Speaking of digital work, this technique is the basis of a lot of the digital paintings I did in the past four or five years:

Let me know if you end up giving it a shot!