I love your coloring style! I struggle so much with painting color, do you have any advice for cohesive color schemes, or how you go about picking what colors and values to use? Do you always use references?
Yes!!! Ok so for a long time I struggled with color too, I would get stuck and give up on whatever I was working on because color just didn't make any sense
truth is, I don't think you can get very far with figuring out color without first figuring out VALUES
So when we color first and then desaturate the left pic, we get a very boring, flat pic, limited values. Middle pic and right pic are 2 examples of grouping values by foreground, midground, and background to create more contast & dynamic layouts.
Case in point; contrast shows our eyes where to go. Our eyeballs like having clear focal points, it makes a good drawing that much more satisfying to look at within its borders.
2 layouts for values that I personally like are dark foreground on light background, and light/dark foreground on midtone background.
once I have a value study I like, I start laying color in by applying a gradient map. Drawing programs will have presets, but I highly recommend learning to build your own gradient maps. From there I'll tweak the hue around until I find undertones I like (more on that later)
NOW LETS TALK LOCAL COLOR. I define local color, aka "flats" as the color your character is "made out of." Basically ask yourself what colors are your character, if your character was sucked into a vacuum where there was no organic source of light/shadow/sun/etc that would influence the local colors.
Once I have local colors, I use a new layer set to overlay and "lay" the local colors over the gradient. Local colors we want + gradient undertones + dynamic values = cohesive colorssssss
Now one thing I want to mention about color in general is, when I started doing digital art, my brain would "icon-ify" colors and pick colors based on an object's "information" (e.g. frogs are green). As a result, I'd pick a lot of saturated colors in the upper right quad of my color picker, and this would limit my color pallets quite a bit.
Now that I'm more well-versed with values, I've intuitively gotten better at picking local colors in other quads and on parts of the color wheel that go against object "info." In general, I like picking local colors that are warm & earthy.
Additionally, you can always use overlay to create cohesion if you're trying to go for a certain look/feel that's tricky to manually pick out on the color wheel!
Last 2 things I'll mention are I avoid using a large amount of default digital "white" in artwork. This white literally does not exist in nature, it's like a vacuum to the point where these "clouds" just look like holes in the pictures here. I highly recommend looking at examples of traditional underpainting & using undertones, this was a gamechanger for me since I learned how to carry a traditional technique into digital art and it greatly improved my digital art
References I always use references, for 2 reasons: 1) I have a tough time conceptualizing whole ideas in my head and can't draw most things from memory (womp womp). 2) I legit do not practice anything ever, oops, I am usually learning at least 1 new thing every time I draw, so basically it'll be like "ok time to learn how wolves work" and this requires references lol. I'll use photos or hostages (ie my partner lol) for anatomy & poses, pinterest & posemaniacs are fantastic for this.
Anyway that's every silly little thing I could think of to say lol. I've done digital art for 10ish years, I'm fully self-taught, take that as you will lol. Thanks for asking this, hope it was helpful! :+)
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