Your art is so breathtakingly beautiful and refined. I find myself just completely awed at how complex your color schemes are and the level of detail makes my heart race. Your art is literally giving me both physical and emotional reactions and it's amazing. you're amazing holy shit. How do you determine which colors to use?
Hi!! Thank you for liking my art!!
Unfortunately I don’t have color theory or a proper procedure to back me up when it comes to coloring but I’ll try to explain the best I can.
The two main questions I ask myself when I want to color are:
What sort of mood do I want this picture to have?
What colors do I feel like using today?
The mood is one of the easiest ways to decide on colors, because some colors are very good at portraying basic moods. A cold feeling can be shown with blues, warmth expressed through oranges. But remember that these colors don’t always have to be used for a singular mood, it’s merely a starting point.
the image on the left is mostly oranges and yellows but it’s not supposed to feel warm because our subject is left in the dark. On the other hand, the image on the right purposefully uses blues and purples as an easy way to keep a cold pale feeling.
So then it boils down to what colors you’d like to use today, and from there you can proportion out what the values of each color should be, for example, do you want to use blue and pink? Will pink be the main color or will it be blue?
Left: Teals are the base, red is the accent. Right: Reds are the base, blue is an accent.
Mixing cool and warm colors! In this image below I have dark browns and dark blues that comprise of the dark shadows. At the same time I also have teal as the highlights as well as pinks and purples.
The base color is what I selected at the start and my other colors are revolved around it. Notice how each warm color has a cool color with the same brightness/saturation that matches it. You can achieve this by just spinning the color wheel. I also like to have very small quantities of bright colors just to add a whimsical touch.
Both images have the same highlight tone, but the feeling is different because of the colors I chose. My intermediate color (that I put in between my brightest and darkest color) is almost always purple or brown. But in the left picture I used a very dark yellow as the darkest shade, in the right, I used a dark blue.
Basically, You don’t have to limit yourself to shading with the same tones, mix it up a little!!
If you want to challenge yourself, something I used to do but not really anymore is choose a base color, pick two colors that are similar to your base color (pink is close to purple and yellow), and a 4th color from across the color wheel (blue is almost exactly across the color wheel). The role of each color can vastly change based on where you want to put them. This is a poor example but these two images have the same base color, what I switched up were the other colors. Since I use a painting style, I rely on the eyedrop after I blend colors together, that way they can work better.
TL;DR: I really just follow my moods, with the help of some colors I like as intermediates (purples and browns). I don’t like doing the same thing over and over again so I try to change things up as much as I can! Spin that color wheel!!!
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