Hi everyone! Chiken here.
In the last chapter, we covered
composition and planning an illustration.
We came up with a few
thumbnails and prepared one for painting.
In this chapter, we will be learning
about colors, and how to apply colors to
a painting in a visually pleasing way.
In this lesson, we will be focusing on
how to choose and apply colors to achieve
a desired mood and create impact.
Firstly, different colors will give different emotions.
Under hue, there are warm colors and cool colors.
Generally, cool colors give a calmer feeling and
puts the eyes at ease, while warm colors
convey more bright and vivid feelings.
Between cold and warm colors, our eyes tend to
gravitate towards warm colors, especially colors like red.
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So, when we compose colors in a painting, if we
want certain focal points to stand out even more, we
can give them warm colors on a cool background and
they will catch our eyes attention even more.
To expand on hue, in chapter
one, we touched on color theory.
We talked about analogous colors; colors close
on the color wheel, and complementary colors;
colors opposite the color wheel.
These two will affect emotion.
Analogous colors will give a more
somber or subdued tone, while complementary
colors can result in larger impact.
Both are good.
It just depends on what kind of emotion
you wish to convey in your painting.
Moving on to Saturation, low saturation with low
brightness are duller and can convey emotions like
sadness or indifference, while Low Saturation with High
brightness, like pastel colors, it can give a
sense of peace and serenity.
And lastly, High Saturation colors, in contrast,
will give a livelier feeling and can
convey emotions like joy. Between the two,
Low Saturation and High Saturation,
our eyes and attention naturally
gravitate towards Higher Saturation colors.
So a lot of the time we will
use Higher Saturation colors for our focal point.
However, colors are all about relativity.
A color with 30% saturation is going to
look duller than a color with 70% saturation,
but brighter than a color with 10% saturation.
For my work, I like to stay within
the 0 to 60 range of saturation.
I feel that more than that can
look a bit unnatural and jarring.
However, that's just a product of my style and
how I usually draw my characters in natural lighting.
And if you want to go for more neon colors
or deeper tone, you can experiment with them.
Again, maybe find an artist who works with
those colors and study their work.
And for brightness,
generally, our eyes will gravitate towards lighter spots, but
if you have a single character in a very
bright background, of course our eyes will go there.
So again, it's all about relativity.
That being said, I usually avoid the extremes, so I
almost never choose the colors from the four far corners
of the palette, and I usually avoid the extreme black.
Now that we covered the theory part,
let's try that on a painting.
I'll just walk you through my
process of choosing a color palette.
I have a base here with my different subjects
blocked in gray, and I've already decided that I
want a kind of happy and serene painting.
So, I want to make the bulk of my painting
lower saturation, and then at the end we can add
some brightness with lighting and maybe bright flowers.
So usually in character art, we have
a set design for our character.
So I'm going to start with colors that I
know are already there and can't really be changed.
So this character has blue hair and light skin,
so I'll paint it in first, and these colors
can still be slightly tweaked later on, but at
least we are in that shade range already.
Now I'll move on to the window sill, and I'm
going to make that fairly dark and saturated so that
my lighter character can stand out from it.
And also I just want to highlight the window sill,
because I think, compositionally, it's a really nice anchor.
So, I chose kind of a purple for
the window sill following her horns, and also
another purple shade for the wall.
This was because I wanted to
keep most of the painting analogous.
Next, I choose a green for the leaves,
and a complementary color for the flowers.
Went with yellow cos that's complementary to her hair.
And now that everything's blocked in, we can
slightly adjust the colors a little bit.
I want to adjust the colors of the leaves, and
I brought it closer to a blue hue, because I
don't like working with too many colors in one piece.
So, I'm trying to get the leaves to a
similar color, or more similar color to her hair.
And now, I'm just putting in highlights.
So, because our eyes are drawn to brightness, I
want to put a light spot on our character.
And now, just adding lighting to our environment.
Again, I tried to use colors already available on the canvas,
to avoid introducing even more colors in, and then to make
it look like light, we can put it to an add
layer mode, and that will just brighten everything up.
And at this stage, we can try different colors.
I thought we could try a blue for the
flowers to make it match her hair, but I
decided that I like the complementary colors more.
I'm fairly happy with it, so I'm going to save it
by clicking share and saving it as a PNG, but I
still want more options, so I'm going to edit it more.
So, like how we make the green of the
leaves slightly blue to match her hair, I'm just
going to make her hair slightly more towards the
green hue to blend in more with the leaves.
And similarly, now just pushing the green of
the leaves even more towards the blue hue.
Here I combined the layer of the window sill and
the wall, so that we can control them together.
And I tried to make them more warm, but I decided I liked
it more cool, so I brought it back to the blue hue.
Also, I changed the color of the flowers.
Now, instead of avoiding adding new colors to the
painting, I kind of decided there was not enough
variation. Because our character and the window sill was
cool and the flowers and the lighted part of
the window sill was both yellow.
So I tried a pink, and I think it matches really well.
Now, I'm just adding a multiply layer to make everything darker,
and erasing the part on the character, So there's an even
brighter spot in our focal point.
And I think this works as our second variation, so I'm going to save it again,
and we can move on to our third one.
The reason why I'm doing more variations is because
I wasn't 100% happy with the first two. So
I'm just gonna continue tweaking the colors.
You can see I made the hair even more green,
and now, I'm making the window sill more warm and
pink, because we have the pink from the flowers.
so I'm trying to match that.
Making the highlight even more brighter using the bloom function.
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And I found a nice pink that goes with her hair.
So final adjustments, and we're done.
I think I'm pretty happy with this last one, and
you can see it's not really a linear process.
There's a lot of trial and error involved,
and adjusting things until I find something I like.
To summarize this demo,
we went for a bit duller and lower saturation
colors to build that feeling of calmness and serenity.
I started out with a complementary color palette,
but along the way, we kind of made
it more analogous, and I think that really
contributed to the peaceful kind of feel.
I put a bright spot on the character so she can
remain the focal point, and her hair turned out to be
the most saturated part of the painting, which is good!
Because then our eyes are drawn to her even more.
In this lesson, we learned about how colors can affect
emotion, and we even composed the colors of a painting.
In the next lesson, we will go more in depth about
how colors might change in light and shadow, and we will
start blocking in the colors of our painting plan.