shading colour tips
hey yall its me the Art Mom™ to help you shade pretty
rule 1: DO NOT SHADE WITH BLACK. EVER. IT NEVER LOOKS GOOD.
red- shade with a slightly darker shade of purple
orange- slightly darker and more saturated shade of red
yellow- i think like..a peach could work but make it a really light peach
green- shade with darker and less saturated shade of blue or teal
blue- shade with purple
purple- a shade thats darker than the purple you’re using and maybe a little pink (MAYBE blue)
pink- darker shade of red
white- a really light lavender or blue..or i guess any really light colour??
black- okay listen dont use pure black to colour anything unless you want to leave it with flat colours because you cant really shade black lol
grey- a slightly darker shade of purple or blue (less saturated)
brown- slightly darker and less saturated shade of purple or red
aaaaand thats all i got lol. let me know if there is anything i should add to this list!!
If you’re a visual learner…
I made some Balls of Colour to go with Art Mom™’s post:
Okay… I’m sorry, but as an illustrator, I think this is terrible advice. This is my opinion, feel free to believe that I’m wrong. This is purely based on my experience with color and color theory.
1) The don’t color with black thing is valid to an extent. Most painters will tell you not to use it or to use it sparingly because black will make things look flat and will heavily desaturate your colors if you’re not careful. I have a problem with telling new artists “DON’T SHADE WITH BLACK OMG NEVAH NOT EVEN ONCE” because there are valid times to use black in shadows, and when you do that, you are telling them that using black is “wrong”, which means they’re less likely to experiment and try new things. I prefer to say, “as a beginner, try to shy away from using black to shade anything until you learn more about color theory. Experiment by all means, but here are some other methods that you might like better.”
2) Telling an artist, especially a new artist to only use a specific color when shading is terrible. I equate it to giving a math student a formula to plug in on tests, but never telling them what the formula actually is or why they’re using it or why it works. It’s an absolutely terrible way to teach someone- especially in art.
There are also so many different ways to color and shade with digital art, telling someone to do it one way is really limiting and not really giving them the best advantage that they have, which is versatility. Plus with painting, there are SO many things to take into account besides the color of the shadow that is going to affect what color the shadows should be- you have local color, relative color, reflected light, and so on.
Here’s some quick and dirty tips on what I do to shade in my paintings:
A) Color wheel- decide what color the shadow is. The most common shade for shadows is ultramarine blue (for those who don’t know, it’s a staple paint color for traditional artists) for natural lighting, but experiment, experiment, experiment! Once you decide on a shadow color, pretend there’s a line going straight through the color wheel dividing it in half. If you use Ultra Blue, the opposite color is MOST likely going to be yellow depending on your art program, colors in your painting should move toward Ultra blue equallyish (there’s lots of room for fudging, do what looks best!) Yellow will be a bit of a toss up depending on your painting and executive decisions as an artist. But basically orange will be shaded with a darker shade of red, red with purple, green with teal, teal with blue, blue is like yellow, dependent on your painting and executive decision. You might choose an indigo, or something warmer (more greenish/tealish) might suit your painting. Experiment! The same works in reverse for painting things lit by direct light AND reflected lighting.
B) Blending Layers- Sometimes you want your shadows to be consistent across the board and don’t want to have to figure out exactly how each color should be altered. Using a multiply layer with a color on it (and it can be any kind of color depending on what kind of lighting you’re doing) can help you manage your values and keep things from getting disjointed. This also allows you to change the color of the shadow if you decide it isn’t working out quite how you wanted it to.
C) Quicker and Dirtier- Sometimes you just don’t want to do any kind of figuring anything out. You can take the flat colors of your painting, copy onto a new layer, and then adjust that layer’s hue, saturation, and value to find shadow colors that you like (and you can experiment with other color correction tools, don’t be shy, try new things!). Once you have a good shadow color, create a blank layer mask on the layer and then erase out bits of the mask to get the lighter colors to shine through.
And remember, if the colors look flat when you’re done, saturation is generally a way to breathe more life into things- Shadows don’t have to be just one layer, you can try doing multiple effects and layer multiple colors to achieve the look you want. Is the green shadow looking a little flat? Try putting some yellow down in an Overlay layer and see if that’ll help it pop.
These are only three of the MANY ways digital programs can help us create art. Experiment! Try something new! Don’t be afraid to mess up, that’s when you find the hidden treasures you didn’t know were there!
Now, all that said, if you have not yet, I strongly encourage you to learn some color theory. Understanding how light behaves and how colors are affected by that and how they interact with one another is something every artist should (in my opinion) take the time to learn. There are a lot of great free resources online that cover color theory and lighting. Google is your best friend! Take advantage of your access to these resources, please!
Sup. Been a while.
So I got a question asking me to clarify what I meant about cutting the color wheel in half so here we go.
using a grey, completely desaturated ball here because for this is doesn’t matter what color the flats are. This is a very typical lighting scheme. the shadow being a desaturated blue, and the highlights a very pale yellow. Paint using the colora on the direct opposite enda of the color wheel is a complimentary color scheme. But in the case of using it in shadow/multiply and highlight/screen layers with blending effects and all that jazz, we’re gonna call this a complimentary lighting scheme.
This is more close to natural lighting because we generally see natural light aka light that comes from the sun as yellow to orange. As a result, when we look at things in natural light, our eyes compensate but balancing out those very strong pale yellow colors with blue in the shadows. This is part of why when you stare at a light and you turn it off, you see afterimages of the light in the OPPOSITE color, because your eyes were compensating for the huge amount of light it was just taking in. Eyes are natural balancers/compensators/equalizers. The same happens when you shine a colored light. place an object in the light and the shadow will start to look like it’s complimentary color.
FUN FACT: This is why in hospitals surgeon smocks tend to be pastel blues and greens, to help compensate for all the red they have to stare at in surgery, sometimes for hours on end. It helps combat eye fatigue.
tbh, I have no idea what the original post was getting at with their suggestion, because if you follow those suggestions to the letter and don’t understand what you’re doing, you could end up with something that looks like crap and you don’t know why and then you blame yourself because the sample balls turned out so pretty so why did you painting not? Well none of those color balls look like they belong to the same lighting scheme, do they? Coloring something with multiple colors that way without understanding the principles of color theory is going to end up with a disjointed looking piece.
Now what if you don’t want to use natural lighting? What if you want to do a true analogous color or lighting scheme instead of complimentary? No problem, pull your colors like this:
In this case the actual direct light is leaning more blue green, so to compensate and make the shadows look as vibrant, make them more yellow green.
But Yoko, can we just choose one color and make the whole picture that?
Why yes. Yes you can. This is call a monochromatic color scheme and AKA it’s ADDING BLACK to your shadows and adding WHITE to your highlights. The colors will look much flatter and not as vibrant compared to the sample above, which is why beginners are discouraged from using black and white to shade and highlight. But you know what? Sometimes you just want that look. You don’t want a piece to be vibrant. So knowing that black desaturates helps you control the mood of a piece.
There are all kinds of crazy things you can do with light and shadow. It doesn’t even have to be one color, your lights and shadows could be multiple colors.
And they don’t even necessarily having to follow a specific color scheme (of which there are many: achromatic, monochromatic, complimentary, split complimentary, triadic, analogous, etc etc etc.)
You know who’s REALLY good at using colors liberally in shadows and highlights? Watercolorists. Watercolorists are the best at using color expressively.
Cuz
C’mon
Just
Look
At
These
Super
Neat
Paintings
So for real, just go hog wild and do what it is you like to do. Experiment. Find out what you like and what you don’t like. And remember that just because you start coloring something one way, doesn’t mean you can’t change your mind and do it different. Especially if this is art you’re making for yourself. Make art that you like. If you want to shade with black, shade with black. If you want to shade with white, shade with white. If you like your art then like your art and NEVER feel bad about it when someone tells you, “You should be doing it this way”. ESPECIALLY if it’s unsolicited feedback (but that’s a whooooole other can of worms). You can listen to feedback and use whatever knowledge you think is valuable, but you don’t HAVE to keep any of it. Throw it all away if you think it’s useless to you. That’s what’s pretty great about art; it’s not a math equation.
Trash Queen Out.
THANK GOD someone wrote this because I really didn’t want to allude to this; this is a complicated thing.
(+ Idk if I should even open this can of worms but if you see concept art with black as the shadow color, it’s most likely because the colors on a character design are separate layers so that they can be switched at the whims of an art director, and the “black” layer is just there to accommodate any color… but this is specifically for that purpose and not for finished paintings…)
