hey you said companion tarot cards usually use really specific and limited color schemes and i was wonder what you mean by that? like what kind of colors or what kind of schemes do you mean?
Hi anon! This is kind of a complicated one so I drew some diagrams : D
From my observations, most of the cards seem to be built on a warm/cold contrast over a spread analogous palette. It’s the ratio of these colours that is important to the overall tone - while some are fairly even analogous, others are instead simply complementary with an accent or even complementary without an accent (e.g. Varric’s lyrium card).
Typically, one colour will come strongly saturated with the other less so, but they will remain within a sort of ‘traditional’ range so as not to look too obviously digital. I would stress the use of hue and saturation gradients and shifts as you paint or fill in your shapes, but the shapes should remain clearly readable as a single colour. Most shadows are also full of colour - for example the ambient occlusion shadows on Hawke’s arms are full of cold greens and warm reds. Blend in some of the opposite cold and warm colours into the highlights and shadows to give the image more coherence where it is painted (this is particularly the case in the Bull/Qunari card).
Bear in mind this is just colour stuff and of course there are a lot of other steps to the cards, but I hope it helps : D Good luck!
