INFJarts’ art tutorial #3: flat color
Alright nerds, imma teach you how to color well! Today I’m gonna show you how to do a simple flat color piece! I’ll be using autodesk sketchbook pro as the program.
Lots of beginners choose very saturated colors for their pieces. This isn’t a good idea unless you’re well experienced with coloring, enough that you know when to use saturation. For beginners, I suggest not using anything right of this line:
Okay, now that that’s cleared up, let’s get into the process!
I start with a sketch! I’m drawing Phoenix here. For this particular piece, I want to go with a nice warm palette centered around the color orange. I pick a soft peach color for the background, not too saturated so it’s not distracting. I also put an airbrush on the eyes to plan out some initial color choices.
Now we do line art! My lines aren’t the cleanest, they’re not really the focus of my pieces. For this, I fill in the eyelashes with a bold black. This is so that I minimize the amount of black I use in the coloring stage, since black and white are no-nos in coloring. My eyes usually overlap the hairline, but it won’t be distracting in the final product, you’ll see.
Next I start the coloring. I like using diversity in my characters, and Pheonix has a very tan skin tone. the amount of layers I use while coloring depends on the piece, but in this one I used three. I don’t pay much attention to coloring inside the lines, because later I’ll clean it up with the eraser tool.
You’ll also notice I changed the background to a darker brown. This is because after the initial colors were down, I realized the background was too bright. Colors all affect each other in a piece, they will look different depending on the colors around them. That’s why it’s so important to make sure your colors aren’t too saturated, they won’t look good with the colors around them.
As you can see, I’ve cleaned it up now! Looks a lot better, huh? For shaded pieces, now would be the time I would combine the color layers to make shading easier. However, we aren’t going past that stage, so I’ll leave the layers be. Besides, that makes the next stage a whole lot easier.
Now I start tweaking colors! If you look closely, I’ve slightly muted the colors to an even less saturated state to be even easier on the eyes! Warm palettes are easy to mess up if you use too much saturation, because they’re already so bright.
And there she is! Phoenix gorl in all her cuteness! If you have any questions, just ask!
