In November 2020 I participated in the “Huevember” challenge, where an artist creates a piece of art every day of November using a set of 30 preselected hues. I love working with limited colour palettes, and Huevember was a great exercise to learn more about colour theory as well as ease myself back into digital art.

I chose the four K/DA members as subjects since they had a variety of outfits to reference and at the time were very popular on social media. I only planned out which member in which outfit I wanted on each day; the pose and palettes were created day to day. I treated every 2 days as a pair, partly to ease pressure if I fell behind a day and partly to encourage more variance between pieces.

Since I wanted each of the four K/DA members to have an equal amount of pieces, I featured two characters each in the last two days. Those days are also the only ones where I designed the outfits, and it was freeing to end the project drawing whatever I wanted.

Overall I feel that my artistic ability improved over the course of the month. The later pieces are more detailed and have greater attention to form than some of the earlier ones, while also taking less time to create since I improved my workflow as the month went on. However, I also feel that the pieces in the middle around the dark blue section are the weakest of the month—the contrast between the lightest and darkest shades is not enough, and many of the details are lost because of this.

Design wise, my biggest lesson about colour theory was how much the hue of a colour changes the mood of the whole piece. For example, even though the provided hue was at the same point on the colour picker, all the violets and blues seem much “darker” than the yellows and limes.

As well, since I was limited to a single hue, I had to learn how to better use tints and shades instead of relying on multiply layers and hue shifting. While “don't shade with black” is still deeply ingrained into me, it's also important to learn when and how to break the rules.