Color Palettes

Trouble-Free Color Palettes: Fiendish
Incorporate chilling colors into your project palette.

The adrenaline rush from a good scare is short lived, but much sought after, as the myriad of thrill rides and horror flicks suggests. Incorporate chilling colors into your project palette to get your audience to keep buying tickets and buying into your designs. And listen to your inner devil like Stefan G. Bucher: “I often have a sort of fiendish theme in my life; the illustrations are merely the tip of the iceberg.”
Bucher says selecting colors for an illustration is “like an equation with several unknowns. I start with a few wild color guesses and then balance the other colors around them. It’s a combination of instinct and careful adjustment. Sometimes I’ll throw a wild Hue/Saturation curve over the final result to see if I missed something interesting if I stayed too safe.”
Starting with a pen and ink illustration, Bucher scans his art and adds color in Photoshop. “My illustrations tend to give shape to the voices in my head,” he says, “which may well turn out to be transmissions from the home world. It would explain a lot.”
Describing his style as “gratuitously intricate and shamelessly frivolous,” Bucher admits the work of other artists inspires him more than anything. “I love seeing artists use colors in counterintuitive combinations. I also love pulling colors from fashion. When I use color, I try to think of it as clothing the piece.”
“The two most important pieces of advice I can give anyone,” says Bucher, “are ‘make yourself useful’ and ‘don’t be boring.’ If you look at your work and your work habits from the perspective of usefulness and interest, you’ll always have work.”