Paint Colourful Character Art

See how Pernille Ørum takes the idea for a character and brings it to life using simple techniques and vibrant colours

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As a visual developer in the animation industry it’s your job to realise yours and other people’s ideas, and to tell a story using your creative skills. This means that you need to convey your objective to your audience and understand the effect different elements in a composition have on the viewer. This being art, nothing’s written in stone, but learning the rules and then deciding how you want to use them is a great start.

I begin a painting by identifying the story. Who is the character or what’s the mood I’m after? Here, I’ll be painting a lady from the Wild West with an attitude and so I think about the colour palettes in the American West and how the warm tones of the prairie could carry this illustration.

In my workshop I’ll be focusing mostly on colouring an image. So to get the most out of this article it’ll be helpful to have a strong understanding of how to construct an image using form, negative space, how to paint light and how colours relate to each other.

I’ll take you through my ideas process and how I decide on the colours early on. Then I’ll show you how I build up an image using flat local colours, before bringing it all together at the end.

1 Thumbnailing my ideas

When starting your drawing it’s important to have a clear vision of what you want to show, and here thumbnailing is a great tool. It’s a chance to quickly sketch out and test various idea without spending too much time on them. It also enables you to run your ideas past other people while it’s still possible to make changes easily. Here I want to draw a Wild West-themed woman with attitude, and try out a range of poses.