How I Choose Background Colours for my Animal Art

I love introducing colour into my animal art and I like to try and make my work stand out by using bold colour for my backgrounds – unless of course I’m using graphite! Using PanPastels with coloured pencils makes it so quick and easy to add vibrant backgrounds, especially on Pastelmat, it seems a shame not to! There are a couple of considerations that go into choosing the colours I use, which I shall do my best to explain in this blog post!

One of the main things I often consider is colour theory – using a colour that provides a strong contrast can make for a pleasing combination. This means that an animal whose fur leans more towards red will look good with a green background, if it’s more orange then blue works well. Of course, these colours also work well with natural subjects as they suggest either sky or foliage.

The blue background was designed to contrast the warm orange tone of the jaguar's fur

Sometimes the subject itself will suggest the background colour. I drew Aurora the cat a while ago, but she always felt unfinished. She has the most gorgeous green eyes, so decided to add a bright green background to accentuate them. The beauty of using PanPastels with coloured pencils, is that provided you have a decent layer of pencil down it acts as a “resist” to the pastels, making it really easy to add the background.

Before Adding the background

With the green background

Other times the background colour choice isn’t as obvious. In this instance I turn to Photoshop for help! I recently drew my own dog Bodie, who is a White Swiss Shepherd, in this case there was no obvious colour choice, so I decided to experiment. I swatched out a few colours I thought would work, then brought a photograph of my work in progress and the swatches into photoshop. I could use the colour picker tool to select the colours and make sperate layers of each one to try against my cut out Bodie to see which I liked best!

Turquoise Background

Orange Background

Violet Background

I had an idea which colour I preferred, but I thought it would be an interesting idea to try a poll on Instagram to gauge what other people thought. It was pretty close between violet and orange, but I felt that the darker violet provided more contrast with his white fur – plus purple is my favourite colour!

The finished portrait of Bodie

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