Creating Color Swatches with Katrina Benson
Creating a Color Swatch from a Reference Photo with Katrina Benson
Painting from a photograph?
As artists, we can choose how we render what we see. We may want a realistic representation of our reference, or not at all. Either way, it can be helpful to verify that the colors and values we perceive in our reference are what’s actually there.
We know that our perception of colors and values isn’t always accurate. Their appearance will be different, and often misleading, depending on the surrounding colors and values.
A very simple way to verify colors is to create swatches using a photo app. This Screencast tutorial shows a quick and simple way to pull color swatches from a photo using a free web-based photo app. The steps shown are basically the same for all photo editing programs, so the method is transferable to other software such as Photoshop and Affinity Photo.
View the video here: Katrina Benson’s Creating a Color Swatch from Reference Photo
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About Katrina Benson:
Katrina Benson is the Vice President of the Art Guild and an award-winning artist working primarily in colored pencil and watercolor. Her work gravitates toward realism, although she enjoys all forms of artistic expression and experimentation. “Working in realism is an opportunity to explore easily overlooked nuances in the world around me. The process of looking deeply and interpreting with each stroke gives me a profound sense of connection and gratitude for the wonders of even the simplest of objects.” Find out more about Katrina on her website www.kblfineart.com.
Katrina teaches Colored Pencil: Foundational Techniques
