Hey! I love the way you paint and I was wondering if you have some resources on where you picked up your use of colour and texture? I'm not looking to imitate your style I just like to learn how people do things and understand digital art as a medium better, I'm also just very entranced by the way you use colour!
Thank you so much!! That’s so lovely to hear <3 Forgive how long this reply will be, I absolutely live for this shit. And all art is an amalgam of things we steal from other artists; steal away :)
Colour:
My use of colour is very much inspired by artists like Yanjun Cheng and Marco Bucci, especially this video about making colours vibrate. Also Emilyena and this video, which largely influenced how I incorporate blue, yellow, and red into skin tones, although I seldom use blending modes.
I start by blocking in with a desaturated mid-dark tone and then build up with more saturated colours. Due to colour relativity, you can get a harmonious and vibrant effect, even using random colours, if they are relatively desaturated. My favourite palette is to block in shadows with red and highlights with blue, but I’ll always make the shadows and highlights opposite temperatures.
For visual interest and texture, I like to add the opposite temperature to an area of colour, usually with hatching. Similar to watercolours, I’ll “overshoot” the colour I want, for example a more saturated blue, and use brush opacity to layer it over orange, resulting in what is actually a desaturated red that appears as blue.
I like a lot of hue variation. For cohesion, I always make sure to spread a colour throughout an entire piece, changing the value and saturation to suit whether it’s in light or shadow, again because of relativity. Towards the end of my workflow I’m more decisive about where the most colourful areas will be, but at the beginning I’ll use a large airbrush to add a lot of variation and build on that.
All that matters is that your values make sense. When you squint at your work, you should be able to make sense of the forms because hue is secondary. Adding purples, greens, pinks to skin aren’t realistic, but when you squint they merge into a normal skin tone because of the ‘vibrating colour’ idea. By making all your colours closer to grey, dark orange can appear green and dark pink can look purple.
Texture:
Aaron Griffin is a big texture inspiration for me. His free brushes make up 95% of my artwork. I don’t like to swap brushes too much while I’m working so most of it is done with Sampled Brush 5 8 and Sampled Brush 7 1, the latter of which has colour jitter. I use it to block in my colours to get an immediate jump on texture and hue variation.
I never use blending tools, only the colour picker and brush opacity to manually blend. When you build up colours in translucent layers, you don’t really have to blend. Sometimes I’ll use hatching to soften a transition or to add more colour. I use the default Clip Studio Paint Design pencil for this.
I find it easiest to work on one layer so I can jump around a lot. I use the largest brush possible then make it smaller and smaller as I do the fine details. Therefore, focal points will have the most contrast of small brush strokes, and the other areas will have larger, unblended brush strokes.
Sometimes when I’m adding colours I use a scribbly motion (back and forth, not in circles), then go in the other direction like cross hatching, colour picking all the while, to “blend” it out.
Loose, “messy” brushwork is my favourite and what I’m working on getting better at. Confidence and shape design as well. Inspiration is Aleksander Rostov, Daniel Gerhartz, John Singer Sargent, and J. C. Leyendecker.
Tutorials:
Almost everything I’ve ever learnt about painting comes from videos by Marco Bucci and Sinix Design. From the former, check out the 10 Minutes to Better Painting and the Quick Essentials series; from the latter, check out the Paintover Pals playlist and the Anatomy Quick Tips series. Watching their processes really influenced my art.
Hope this helped :) I will rant forever about this topic and my inbox is always open <3
baratheonpilled
jbbartram-illu
izzy806
dededos
