An Ode to the Colour Purple

Soon, I'd post my video about embracing purple in my most recent illustration. It's this purple night scene with a beauty sitting on the thicker ends of a protruding tree root with long black hair streaming down his back, surrounded by glowing stars.

My illustration

Before posting it everywhere on social media, I'll bump the saturation up so that the purples and pinks can shine in their glory. It's a unique piece in my portfolio. I don't usually use this many cool tones, preferring warm oranges, bold reds and happy yellows. 

Yet, there's an allure here. It's magical, shining and an ode to how beautiful purples and pinks can be.

The same piece but more saturated. See the beauty in it?

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This piece is inspired by an artist named Erin Kate Archer, "a new york-based artist creating ethereal mixed media paintings", according to her bio on her website. Although I'll mention her in my video more concretely, I want to take the time to articulate my thoughts properly here. (Hi nuggets who clicked my YouTube description!)

I first discovered her work through an Instagram reel where she dabs on acrylic paint, smooth as butter, onto the canvas for her painting Ever Onward. 

It features three women in a forest lit with morning sunlight where the trees are a bright, cloudy blue, against a peachy skyline peeking through the gaps. 

The three women are rendered in pastel strokes, where the hot pink underpainting quietly shines through. Little twinkling stars dot their hair and garments, making them look like princesses, ethereal guardians from another world leading their horse to a world hidden behind a mess of trees.

Throughout her work, Archer likes to embed her faceless women in lush foresty scenes, set at dawn, where the worlds are dominated by pinkish cool tones with hints of sunlight. For the longest time, I thought cool tones were, well, cold, unwelcoming, sophisticated and detached. 

Yet, I look at Archer's work and I think purples and pinks with a dash of blue create scenes of intimate affection between women. Oranges peek through the gaps of her paintings, little by little, through the sky and the subjects' skin tones, often enough to bring contrast to the scene.

I see this most vividly in her painting Woven Together, my number one colour reference for this piece. 

Also rendered in acrylic paint, the painting depicts seven girls in a circle in some overgrown grass, weaving together a tapestry of stars. Her technique shines the most here, where loose brush strokes form leaves and heart-shaped weeds, and texture on the trees, while reserving the precise lines for the glowing white stars in the centre.

Most of all, however, I fell in love with how she rendered the trees. Rich saturated purples for the shadows and hot pink for the highlights. If you were wondering why I complained about colour models on my Instagram, this is why. I wanted to capture these colours for myself, to inject a dreamy quality that feels absent in my work but that I admire.

In a way, I have. If I saturate the colours enough, I'll easily achieve these pinks and purples. While I think I could've injected more warm tones for contrast, I'm still pleased with how it turned out. The piece is a fun experiment, a foray into a colour palette that felt out of reach for so long in my artistic process.