Vintage colour palette

50's colours in art

This is a scan from Sears Harmony House brochure of 50s/60s paint colours. I found it from www.retrorenovation.com.
The colours are all punchy but also a little murky. The yellows and oranges look as though they've been mixed with a dab of brown or green and the lighter yellow or cream colours are very pale.
The blues are typically 1950s - soft and cartoony. They all remind me of the colours used in Disney films.

I composed my own colour swatch for my digital illustrations. These colours were pin-pointed using the Eye Dropper tool on Photoshop from various 50's posters and illustrations. They range from olive greens to military, washed-out blues and loud reds. I will use these when colouring my illustrations on Photoshop.

 Referring back to Disney, I compiled this colour swatch on Photoshop of the colours used in Disney's 1937 hand-rendered animation Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs. This would deliver good insight into vintage colours and the paints used in that period.
Already, just by looking at this still from the animation, you can see instantly that the colours are darker and softer than those used in Disney's contemporary, digital motion pictures (for example, Princess & the Frog). The colour swatch shows how pale the greens used for the grass and leaves are; how the bark of the tree isn't even brown and how Snow White's lips are a soft red, as opposed the blood-red we're used to from the story. The still seems accurate in colour, as it has been screen-shot digitally. I know, from creating this colour swatch, that vintage colours are darker and paler than what the subject should be. I know that Disney also used unusual colours for the animals. The chipmunks are a rusty red colour! I would have coloured them brown.

Colour palette for front cover:

 I used these colours for my front cover, taken from the previous colour palette (above). They are inspired by the 50's colour schemes of pale, weak shades and gharish primary colours.