hello, I love your art! how do you go about coloring your pieces ?
Thank you so much! Color is super important to me, so this will take a while to explain :,) Please keep in mind that I work with an RGB color scheme, and a lot of this is to my personal taste!
I like to mimic the oil painting process while I paint, so I try to find a dominant color to create the "underpainting" base. I don't have much to say about choosing your base, just draw from a lot of different sources to get a sense of what works for you!
From there I lay down my flat colors, shifting hue and value to make it feel like a cohesive whole, with a priority on establishing a sense of depth. Farther away from the viewer, colors have less and less hue and value variation, meaning the farther away something is, the "flatter" it looks. I tend to exaggerate this, and when blocking things out I make sure that even the basic colors establish this.
Here's an example where the flatness is more obvious!
Once the basics are done, I block out the basic shading of the piece, and typically use color dodge and multiply layers to establish light and shadow respectively. I don’t necessarily recommend using these specific layer types, as I just use it as a base to paint over! What I will say is that the shadow should be complimentary color of the light source, and there’s an asterisk next to that.
As an example, yellow lights would create a shadow of its color wheel opposite, purple. But color palletes can be restricted, and you should try to follow that principle within the constraints you have, and create shadows more *towards* the complimentary. Yellow light could create red shadows if you’re limited to warm colors, or greyer shadows if you’re limited to yellows. I recommend having a black color layer that you can toggle on and off to check the values, to make sure that everything reads well.
Blocking out lighting can compromise the depth established in the first step, so before I start painting I use normal or overlay layers to to make what's farther away appropriately flatter.
From there, I try to mimic the process of physically painting! I tend to work from the back of the painting forwards, and if that doesn't work in context, work in the order that I want the viewers eyes to travel around the piece.
While shading, I tend to not blend smoothly so much as find the inbetween colors, and then paint with that. The eyedropper tool is my friend for this, but isn't a panacea---Painting with the direct in between two colors can make it look more flat, and I recommend shifting the in between color to be more saturated or in different hues, and doing these shifts more often the closer you are to the viewer. I sometimes forgo the eye dropper tool to guess at the color, which will add more life to a piece.
Making the shading process more saturated and/or varying in hue is a well-shared trick to make things look more alive, especially faces--but something I also do is occasionally move it to have areas of desaturation, which ALSO makes it feel more alive, and prevents eye strain. I used the above principles a lot here!
The rate at how I add and subtract saturation and hue isn't consistent, and ideally (I don't always do this) should change with material, depth, as well as the mood of the piece. It can be difficult, and its a very big "it depends" thing! Here's where having the black color layer comes in handy, just to make sure that whatever variation you use still reads in the piece's values.
Something that's also very important for my coloring style is setting a maximum darkness and brightness--I was particularly inspired by how Over The Garden Wall has large swaths of black, which both saves time and creates a cleaner composition. However, I dislike moving towards pure black, as that doesn't always exist in real life, and leads to duller colors when I paint. What I do is try to have a "black point" and "white point" that is set in stone, where I can't get any darker or brighter than these limits specifically. This limits the visual range, forces me to think about composition, and can add a lot to the coloring stylization. Some examples where this is more obvious!
I also like to exaggerate the light source by cheating the colors to push the affected areas beyond what the light source would realistically do—its most obvious here, where the light is yellow but the color is sometimes pushed to green or teal.
I don't have much more to say other than don't be shy to experiment, always try to do something new, and look to many, many places for inspiration. Everything I listed is what works for me, but you can find something entirely different! I sincerely hope that helps :,]
