Some of you asked for a color tutorial, and I’ve been kicking around ideas all day about the best way to do one. I’ve tried to do them before, and sometimes they’re helpful, but mostly I feel like they’re not. And I think that’s because I try to explain color theory, which is too big of a bite to take. Color theory is somethng you should read about because it will help you with your art. I just can’t tackle it here.
Instead, I’m going to do what I did in the blocking tutorial and just take you through my own steps in building a palette for a realistic portrait using a model/reference.
So I grabbed a random screencap…
Right away things get tricky because film, no matter how good the film is, is not real life. And the colors are so contextual (and sometimes very filtered), that they look ugly or nonsensical when translated to an art medium.
For example, if I were to guess, I’d say he had a pale complexion and was wearing a light green tunic.
But if I actually go in and color-pick the image, this is what the colors end up being:
Those are not the colors I expected.
So how do I deal with that discrepancy? I take what I know/want (pale man, light green tunic) and what I actually see (dark red, dark grays), and I figure out how to get from one to the other.
And here’s the funny thing about color: It doesn’t actually matter that much.
What matters more is the value of the color—it’s lightness and darkness. As long as you get the lightness and darkness right, you can pretty much make any color believable. And I know this is true because here’s a painting by Van Gogh, who puts greens, blues, pinks, bright oranges, and dark reds in his face, and it works. And not only does it work, but it makes a huge emotional impact:
So I suppose my overall advice would be to not be afraid of using the wrong color because you can make any color work. What’s more important is how it compares to the other colors around it.
When I make a palette, I look at the value first. I look at what the light is doing—What’s dark? What’s light? What’s in the middle? Where are the shadows and highlights? I don’t choose brilliant or surprising colors like an Impressionist might, though. Instead, I go for colors that fit the mood I want to convey, which is mostly quietness and softness. If I wanted to convey more visceral emotions, I might pick more visceral colors. But that’s not my style.
So now let’s go back to Denis, and here’s the color palette I would choose for his portrait:
And here’s how it would look if my colors were applied in the same places:
(I did not color-pick the gold turban in my first example, but I decided to add it here in my own palette so you can see how it changes along with the other colors).
Basically, all I’ve done is a value adjustment. I’ve brightened the colors, adjusting as I see fit, but I’ve kept the differences in value between them the same. In other words, the range between the colors in my palette is pretty close to the range between the colors in the original cap.
It’s not the colors, see? It’s the difference in value. And there’s not much of a difference. My style is soft, and I prefer muted, subtle colors. So I keep my range pretty narrow. If I put everything in grayscale, you can see what I mean:
See how close the grays are to each other? Nothing is too white, and nothing is too black. There’s not a lot of contrast.
And this is why Van Gogh’s choice of colors is so convincing. Look what happens when I convert his portrait to grayscale:
Everything looks natural. You can’t even tell he used weird colors because Van Gogh understood that you can do whatever you want with color as long as you keep the value between the colors consistent.
It takes a lot of practice to “see” things like value range and differences in light and dark. But learning how to see a good range in value—and then to produce a good range using any colors you want, even if the colors go against what you know or observe—is probably the most important thing about working in color that I can think of. I think there’s a lot you can learn about color theory in general, and all of it can be useful (and the internet is full of resources to help you), but you have to be able to work in those black and white values first. <3
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