✿.,-'-,.PROCRASTINATION AND DE-STRESSING at its finest-- where bitches and workload can't find me...-'-,.✿ Part-time struggling independent girl, full-time dreamer/fangirl ✿ Multi-fandom ✿ Prone to multi-shipping ✿ I don't usually bite so fire away ✿
Stumbled across your art recently, and I totally admire your work! As a complete noob to the digital art scene, I'd just like to ask whether you have any tips on colour picking (like for skin tones, under varied/dramatic lighting and such!). I have a ton of other things I want to ask, but I'll limit myself to one question and then try to google the rest, haha/ Thanks for sharing your art with us! ^^
ahh thank you so much! ♥ welcome to the digial art scene friend, i hope you enjoy your stay and ctrl + z
now onto your question! (if you don’t know what layer and layer modes are and how they generally work you should probably google that before you continue reading)
we all perceive colour differently (thx science) and i trust my intuition a lot when it comes to colour picking because of that, and also because i feel like you can make pretty much every colour combination work within the right context. context is key! but still, remember that all of this is about how i perceive colour, so you might not agree with everything i say.
here’s a quick rundown of terms you’ll see around a lot in reference to colours and shading: the hue, which is the ‘colour’ itself, the saturation aka the intensity, and the brightness [or value] which describes how dark or bright we perceive a colour to be.
rule of thumb: when you shade don’t just add black (or white) to your base colours, that will make your drawings boring and lifeless. use different hues and saturation!
now first things first: which skin colour does the character have?
you’ll mostly be navigating in the red to yellow spectrum for the skin tone. so when i pick the base colours i usually start with the skin and adjust the rest of the colours accordingly. if you’re not sure where to begin it might help if you first determine the values (brightness) of the base colours in grayscale.
and here are a few colour variations—i stuck to the approximate values but played around with a lot of different hues and levels of saturation.
now compare 3 and 5: you’ll notice that 3 is very bright and leans towards orange hues, whereas 5 has a pinkish tint.
on the left i gave 5 the hair colour of 3 and in my opinion the pink hue of the skin doesn’t go well with the orange undertone of the hair. you’ll have to experiment a lot to find out which combinations work for you.
ctrl + u is your biggest friend (or image >> adjustments >> hue/saturation in photoshop, the shortcut works in sai and clip studio paint too). play with the sliders and see what happens. i do that a lot myself, because it’s easier to coordinate the colours like that afterwards instead of trying to manually pick perfectly matching ones right away.
for further adjustments i like to use an extra semi-transparent layer on top of everything with just a single colour to add atmospheric light. this unifies the colours and makes them more harmonious, if that’s what you’re looking for. this is about as far as i’d go if i didn’t want to shade the drawing.
if i do want to shade, especially with high contrasts and dramatic light, i darken the base by just adding an additional black layer, here set to 40% opacity. of course you could add a colour layer like the ones i mentioned previously too.
to create an impression of dramatic light you need a high contrast between light and dark areas (1). if i want additional visual intrest i often add secondary light which falls onto the main shadow areas. here i picked a faint greenish blue to balance out the yellow (2). and since light is at least partially reflected when it hits a surface you should add a faint glow that goes across the shadow/light border (3).
for this shading style i like to use the layer mode colour dodge with lowered opacity + fill settings. for some layer modes opacity and fill do the exact same thing (e.g. for multiply or screen). however for colour dodge there’s a big difference:
a lowered opacity merely alters the transparency of the entire layer. that looks pretty awful sometimes, because the bright orange affects the dark of the hair much more intensely than the already brighter skin. but when you lower the fill percentage you primarily lower the amount of light that falls onto darker colours. so the layer’s opacity setting treats every colour equally whereas the fill setting takes their values into consideration. it might be hard to understand if you don’t try it out yourself, so just play around to get a feel for how it works!
and to summarise, here’s a process gif:
colour is an extremely big topic and i’ve only barely scratched the surface but i hope that still helped you out a little! the fastest way to learn is always to try things yourself, so grab a sketch and experiment. 👍
i use overlay all the time to make colours more vibrant and to make areas warmer or cooler. good for colourful ambient light (like glowy magic stuff).
multiply is really good for establishing a light source very quickly!! play around with the hue to get shadows with cool colours. for more detailed work you can use two or three tones on a multiply layer for more dimension.
screen is something i only recently started using regularly! it’s really great if you have a very bright light source. you can also use screen and paint on the edges of a backlit character to make the lighting more intense. a good thing to know about screen layers is that the darker the colour you use, the less it lightens; using black on a screen layer leaves no effect on the colours underneath (the opposite is true for multiply layers!).
and you can also use these layers for an entire painting instead of just on a character! i don’t have a visual example on hand, but stuff like making the area around a warm light source warmer, making a light source brighter and more vibrant, or using gradients set on multiply or screen are just some of the ways you can apply these to a full painting :)
She looks up from her clipboard to find him running towards her panting.
“Kisumi-kun?”
A warm pair of lips grazes just past the corner of her own and she flushes into the most vibrant shade of red. She flusters and pushes him away.
“Wh-wh-what was that for!?” she stutters, body trembling slightly as she repeatedly rubs her lips with the back of her hand as if to remove the remnants of the inexistent kiss left by the sudden contact.
He stands back, hands in his pockets and smiles sheepishly at her, eyes crinkling with amusement.
“Eh? But I thought you wanted me to kiss you…” he says teasingly.
She scowls and pounds her fists mercilessly against him as he stealthily dodges them, laughing.
Gou doesn’t know why and how it came to this point, but they are friends anyway.
He was there when she’s in need and didn’t know what to do, when she was stuck and there was no one else to help her.
Even now when everyone seems to be leaving, he was always there.
-----------
“Hey.”
He arrives a little bit later than she had hoped, traces of liquid already showing in her eyes.
She turns to him pouting – half-smiling half-frowning because she didn’t know which emotion she should feel at the moment— and exclaims.
“Where were you? You’re late!”
He raises his hands in surrender and smiles at her with his usual cheeky grin, something she thought suited him perfectly but didn’t dare tell him out loud.
“Hey, I’m here now am I not? Chill out Gou…”
He moves toward her and wraps her in a comforting embrace to which she initially fights but in the end surrenders.
“Still, you’re late.”
Her voice was muffled and ragged, and between the rawness of her voice and his now damp shirt, he knew that she was crying. He smiles as he gently strokes her hair.
“Okay, I’m sorry I’m late. Happy now?”
She doesn’t reply but she knew that he already knows.
She knew that he knew exactly why she was acting this way; that he knows, even without her saying, her feelings for a certain someone; and that he’s here comforting her because he knows exactly how she feels. That he knows how painful it is to be left by someone you really love without a chance of telling them how you feel; because like her, she knew that deep inside he was just as tortured as she was; she knew that no matter how much he tries to hide it, he understands because they were actually on the same boat. And it dawns to her just how similar their situations are that she almost laughs—they are kindred spirits and it scared her to think that with such a short amount of time, they had already grown this close.
……
Remember that time when I said I won’t ever want to deal with the likes of you?
She calls out to him more timidly than usual, her voice faltering as if she were unsure that it really was him that she’s seeing.
He stops a few steps after but not turning to face her. Several moments passed and she was getting nervous. She was about to call him again when he turns to face her— just a brief nod and a smile, then proceeds walking out the school gates with his beautiful companion in hand, leaving the stupefied redhead by the building’s entrance.
As if on cue, the wind picks up and thunder roars in the distance.
She already knew that he was the worst womanizer with absolutely no morals when she first met him so she didn’t know why it came as a shock when she saw him again surrounded by his fanclub/harem. He was ignoring her and it irked her to no end.
Sure. He was a flirt, a pervert and a goddamn skirt chaser but he was her friend. At first she didn’t know how important he was to her but now that he’s gone, she realizes just how much she misses him. And though it pains her to admit it, it seems like she needs him in her life after all.
……..
“Kisumi.”
The sound of her voice echoes throughout the gym and he momentarily freezes.
She approaches him cautiously, each step wobbly and unsure, wishing and praying that she had the confidence of the girls who could just casually approach him. Fists clenching on her sides, she steels her resolve and speaks.
“You’ve been ignoring me.”
Her voice was small and timid just like that day when she called out to him, when scalding heat seared through her chest at the sight him and another girl, and how she just wanted to slap her forehead and hide herself in a huge hole because of just absurd she thinks she is being.
Kisumi stops dribbling and she fidgets. He turns to face her and smiles, though she notes that it lacks the usual warmth it had in them.
“Eh… No I’m not. I was just busy…”
“Yeah, busy flirting and playing around with those girls,” she murmurs under her breath, cheeks tinged pink as she glares to the side.
Her comment does not go unheard by the male, and he brightens. He casually approaches her, a flirtatious smirk adorning his face.
“Why my dear Gou-chan? You jealous?” he teases her and leans over, cupping her cheek with one big calloused hand.
She blushes into a deeper shade of scarlet and scowls.
“W-What!? No! Of course not! Why should I even be jealous?”
She was surprised when he pulled back his hand and slowly turned his back on her. He was already at the exit of the gym when she finally found her voice.
“Kisumi?”
He pauses before turning back to look at her in a smile that made her heart clench.
“I was just teasing Gou-chan. Well then, I’ve got to go. See you later…”
As the door of the gym shut close, in a way it felt as though he was closing himself off to her too. Gou bit her lip and closed her eyes. It was raining quite heavily outside but inside the closed gym, she’s standing in a downpour.
The door opened and purple eyes widened in surprise as he met with familiar burgundy ones.
“Gou-chan, what are you doing here!?” he exclaims pushing the door open revealing a shivering drenched redhead.
“I got locked out of the house,” was her short reply.
He stared at her frowning, eyebrows scrunched together as he frowned at her in disbelief. She sneezes and he realizes that it was in fact raining very hard outside. He gives a huge sigh and rubs the back of his neck, a mannerism Gou notes he does when uncomfortable, and she almost smiles.
“Fine, come in.”
And she follows him inside, welcoming the comfortable warmth that thawed the chill on her skin.
……..
Gou was thankful that Kisumi did not shut the door to her face. She was half-expecting that he would if their recent interactions were any indication. Instead he treated her with care just like he had used to, as if nothing had happened and for that she was relieved. She had feared that he would continue to ignore her regardless of whether she was drenched or not. She smiles thinking that it was stupid of her to think of him that way. She knew that through and through, Kisumi was a good guy and whether he was indeed ignoring her, she knew that he won’t ignore someone in need. He was not heartless after all.
She goes out of the shower humming, her hair wrapped in a towel. As she was about to change, she blushes seeing the change of clothes he provided. Apparently there was no woman in the house which just leaves Kisumi’s own oversized T-shirt for her to wear. She pauses, contemplating on whether to wait until her clothes dry off first but then she sneezes again and the idea immediately gets thrown out the window. Hesitantly, she slips it on with little difficulty, then proceeds to look at herself in the mirror.
It wasn’t that bad. It went halfway through her thighs—not too short, not too long. It was actually pretty decent as if she was wearing a short little cotton night gown. But it was Kisumi’s, and that thought bothered her. If he were her brother’s she would have no problems parading the outfit around the house, but it wasn’t Rin’s. It belonged to a boy who, while she was very close to, had a very infamous reputation with women, and as much as she wanted to trust him, the fact remains that he is a player.
A soft knock interrupts her thoughts as Kisumi tells her that dinner is ready. She answers with a soft “Okay” and heads toward the door of the bathroom. She stands there for several moments, hand hovering over the doorknob before she finally goes out to the living room where Kisumi was setting up the table.
……….
“No.”
He refused to meet her gaze as he looked to the side. She stands up from her seat and almost slams at the table.
“Why can’t I?” she argues. “Please… Just for one night? It’s still raining and besides, mom won’t be home until tomorrow morning. I promise I’ll behave myself…” she looks up to him pleading.
He scratches the back of his neck in annoyance and frowns.
“Look Gou. I only let you in because it was raining very hard outside.”
“But-”
“Have you tried Hana-chan’s?”
“She’s in Tokyo right now visiting her relatives…And-”
“What about Haru’ or Makoto’s place? It’s much nearer than here.”
Gou felt her cheeks flush as anger boiled within her.
Why can’t he just understand?
“Look, I just wanted to stay with someone I’m comfortable with and someone who I think could be trusted,” she muttered grudgingly under her breath, a faint pink dusting her cheeks. “If you don’t want me staying here in the first place, you shouldn’t have let me in.”
She probably struck a nerve because she was surprised when he raises his voice at her.
“It’s not that I didn’t want to let you in Gou! It’s just not appropriate. This is not appropriate. We’re no longer kids! You’re in your last year in high school and I’m in college. And you do know my reputation… This is…”
“Liar.” She snaps at him, unable to hide the hurt in her voice anymore. “It’s not like you’ve cared before when we were still both in high school.”
“Just admit it! You don’t want to have anything to do with me anymore.”
He groans out loud, clearly exhausted as he turns around and ruffles his hair messy with both hands.
“Argh! Gou… Please don’t make this hard for me than it already is…”
She bites her lip and refuses to close her eyes, knowing full well that the dam in her eyes would overflow at any moment.
“Then why? Why are you doing this Kisumi? You did nothing but ignore and avoid me these past few months and don’t you dare deny that you weren’t because we both know you were!”
“Gou…”
“Why Kisumi? Did I do something wrong? Tell me…” she approaches him no longer able to hold back her tears, and she feels them burn a trail on her cheeks.
“Tell me... If you hate me, tell me what I did wrong… If there is anything I can do to make it right… Just please…”
They were less than a foot away when she tugs the hem of his shirt. She closes the gap between the two of them and she rests her head on his back, letting her tears dampen his shirt.
A/N: And.....it’s NOT yet finished. :p Sorry, I just couldn’t help myself from posting this. I know it sucks big time, the grammar’s bad and yadayadayada but I figured I should post it anyway before my feels for this ship evaporate and I TOTALLY butcher the story. Forgive me, I AM BUT TRASH.
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