One of my quick sketches with spot colour

Even though I use a lot of bright colours in my sketches, I’m also a fan of sketching in monochrome, using black ink lines with a bit of tonal shading with Tombow water soluble pens.

In the past I’ve also played around with using a half-and-half technique:

• Ink Line Figures with a watercolour background
• Watercolour figures and an ink line background

But there are more complex, and visually interesting ways to mix colour with black and white.

Using Ink Lines and High Contrast Areas

One of the artists I follow on Instagram, Mehmet Saygin, illustrates this technique really successfully. Rather than just using ink lines, he also adds black area for simple shadows and to bring some contrast to specific areas in his sketch.

This high contrast of black and white, creates a start focal point, and it means you can keep the coloured areas quite simple, so they don’t compete for attention with the high contrast areas.

For example, in this Instagram post you can see the shadow areas in the bbq, boats, under the tableware, and in the clothing folds and hair. But he’s also used chunks of black to depict the wine bottle and wine. By adding these additional areas of dark tone, it elevates this sketch from a simple line drawing with a bit of colour, to a vastly more interesting sketch.

Using Colour to Separate the Sketch into Three Areas

I love how Mehmet uses his areas of colour. He’s clearly delineated the foreground, mid ground and background, using three different colours. Rather than following the warm in the foreground and cool in the background rules using a trio of primary colours, he’s made it a little more interesting by using two primary colours and one secondary colour.

The background looks like a French Ultramarine, the mid ground warm yellow that looks like New Gamboge. But rather than using a red in the foreground, he’s used a secondary colour to create a violet/purple mix – probably mixing the French Ultramarine with something like a Quin Rose, to create those colours.

Mid Ground and Foreground Colour Harmony

The yellow is the brightest and warmest colour, and it immediately draws the eye, but because there’s no details in the mid ground, your eye doesn’t linger there and is automatically drawn to the warm colours, and all the detail, in the foreground, and then to the background detail.

If he’d used Quin Rose as the red in the foreground, it would have been a very stark use of colour. But because he’s used a secondary colour mix instead of a primary colour, it’s created more of a balanced sketch with effective colour harmony, because the yellow and purple are complimentary colours.

Mid Ground and Background Colour Harmony

The blue and yellow are both warm colours, and so they have a natural colour harmony, although the yellow is a lot brighter than the blue. He’s actually added a little touch of the warm violet colour to some of the detail between the mid ground and background, and mixed a little of that warm colour into the base of the sky. which helps soften the transition between the yellow and blue.

Deceptively Simple

All in all, what first appears like a very simple line drawing with loose watercolour applied, is actually a well thought out and balance sketch, that (a) leverages the rules of colour harmony seamlessly, and (b) uses the start contrast of white and black to create focal areas in the foreground and background, with a couple of transitionary lines and marks in the mid ground.

I’m going to look for an opportunity to sketch a scene and use a similar strategy for applying colour and areas of black, and see how the approach works with my style of sketching.