Would love to see a time lapse of how you put your art together <3
Thanks! I don't have any actual time-lapse footage recorded but sometimes I save intermediate steps. I have also been meaning to write a bit about how I handle colour.
I tend to treat colour efficiency like a game and try to use the fewest colours possible to achieve a desired look. The fewer I have, the easier it feels to manage them and make them all work together effectively. I'll step through a recent piece of Super Mario Sunshine fan art that I think demonstrates my process pretty well:
[This is a recreation; I didn't save the initial layout step, but it looked something like this]
I start by working out the basic composition with blobs of colour, not line art. For fan art I'll just plan out the scene using similar colours to those presented in-game, and then adjust them as I go. Starting with 7 colours here.
Now in order to clarify the shapes and sell the brightness of the sun we need some shadows. The orange-red, brown, and dark green can work as shadowed versions of the yellow, pink, and light green respectively, and I introduce an 8th colour, black, for shadows on those already-darker colours.
Here I realised that maybe the brown is unnecessary and I can just use the orange-red for all of that stuff, which also makes everything a little brighter and sunnier. The exception is Mario's hair, which will be black instead to maintain contrast against his hat and shirt. That changes his appearance a bit, but it's not too much of a stretch and I kind of like it. It sort of feels like a throwback to his early arcade designs. Also some much more subtle changes: The yellow has been brightened a little bit for more contrast against the pink sand and the blue has been slightly desaturated to make the sunlight appear warmer.
At this point I went back to check more reference and realised that all of the cataquacks (duck-billed guys) on the watermelon level are red, not blue. I liked the blue in this image but I'm also a stickler for accuracy to the source material. And I usually treat fan art as an exercise to sharpen my skills, AND it's another opportunity to simplify the palette, so lets get rid of that blue and see if we can still make it look good. Mario's overalls have been switched to dark green because that's the closest remaining colour. I don't love that but they're such a small and relatively unimportant area of the overall image that I don't want to introduce another colour just for them. I tried shifting the green a little more toward blue but that made the watermelon look weird, and without any blue this red-green palette feels a little off to me. What to do…
The solution I came up with was to shift the black to a dark blue. This gives me the colour I need for the overalls, adds some more saturation to the shadows, and reintroduces a cool tone to balance out the warm ones. We lose shading on Mario's overalls but that doesn't matter. I can loosely justify blue as a shadow colour because shadows on sunny days often tend to be bluer due to the ambient light from the clear blue sky (although more realistically most of the shadows here are down-facing and would be shifted pink due to bounce light from the sand, but don't worry about that). I also brightened the greens and reds to make the colours just a little more vivid.
I'm not sure if this is necessarily better than the image from two steps ago with the blue cataquacks, but I think it's interesting and I had fun making it. I finished with even fewer colours than I started with, which feels very satisfying to me, but there was no particular reason I had to stop at 6. The image could go down to 4, 3, or even 2.
It's a fun efficiency challenge and I think these each have their own appeal, although they deviate progressively further from the look I originally set out to achieve.
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