Art question: your colors and lighting are always so gorgeous - what’s your process look like for colors in terms of layering/combining colors?
Ok, time for the end boss, this is probably gonna be a long one so I hope this is still gonna be understandable and not too much as a text post.
First up I’m just gonna put a quick and very basic break down of how I often approach coloring before I go more into detail.
I’d definitely recommend to not leave your canvas white while painting, I either rough in my background first or give the canvas a grey-ish blue color if it doesn’t have one. The bright white of the canvas will make it harder for you to judge colors, having a nice midtone will help you make better color decisions and get more accurate colors!
Here’s a little snippet from a previous post about how I pick color! (check out full post for some useful links)
Here is one of the brushes I really like using in paint tool sai2! Other than that I might use the standard marker tool with a square shape. In clipstudio i try to use similar textured brushes.
To blend or to create soft edges, which really helps you to sculpt your drawiing/painting, I often just start painting on a new layer above the one with the base color and then use a soft eraser! I might also use paint tool sai’s water tool, which I find really useful and pretty unique, I sadly haven’t really been able to replicate it in programs like clip studio.
In the two pictures above I already did a lot of defining and painting before I moved to a layer ontop of the lines because the lines were fairly clean already. Sometimes my “underpainting” looks way rougher though and I just put in some blobs of color for hue variation, especially the more red-ish areas and then do most of the painting above the lineart layer!
Not sure if there’s much to say to the overpainting stage, as mentioned before this is just where I clean up the whole drawing and define the features more, especially the eyes, eyebrows and lips.
NOW, the real fun begins....
After I’m mostly done with painting, I start to properly establish the lighting, some people find it easier to do it the other way around, and sometimes I do so too. But often I push for the strong lighting at the end so I can focus more on painting.
This is where I play around a lot with layer modes, usually I use a combination of overlay and shine to put in some bright warm light from one direction!
The way I do it is I usually put all the layers of the person/object into a folder so it’s separated from the background, then I make a new layer on top of that folder and use clipping group. It works similar to a layer mask, whatever i do in those clipped layers will only affect the layers that are in the folder! Since only my character is in that folder, my background will be left alone.
As mentioned before, I now use gradients to give the entire picture more hue variation and to properly give it strong lighting. Make sure the gradient tool is set to “color to transparency”. I use a warm orange/red color for the top right side where I want the light to hit and put it in overlay mode. And then use a colder purple/blue color on multiply mode and pull it up from the bottom to the middle.
At the end I often adjust the colors a bit, I like to use cool colors in the background to make the warm colors of the skin etc pop! So often I push those reds of the characters a little more! In paint tool sai I just adjust the hue and saturation a bit. In more complex programs like CSP I do it in the color balance option.
You can see how I pushed it a bit more towards red here, to make it stand out more against the blue-ish background. I also pushed the blue’s in the hair color. Giving dark hair blue-ish undertones can make for a really good contrast compared to the warm colors in the skin!
I think this last part is really the most important to me,lighting can REALLY change your entire picture, and I think gradients are a super easy and fast way to do it! If I pull up the picture from the beginning again, you can see just HOW MUCH the picture changed again after I was pretty much done painting by adding strong lighting! It’s a good way to pull the attention to a certain spot, in this case the faces/the kiss, where all the strong saturated colors are!
I also think that a good contrast between warm and cool colors is really important! As you can see I often use that to make my characters stand out from the background. If you put everything in cool colors or everything in warm colors it’s easy to make your object get lost in the background.
I recently found this guys YT channel, he talks alot about warm vs cold colors, which I think is so helpful! I’ve hardly seen any other artists talk about it that much.
If any parts were unclear or I left something out/ someone wants to know more about a certain topic just let me know! Thanks to everyone who’s sent me asks