Couleurs / Colors
Update: I fixed the images.
*Note: J’ai écris cet article en anglais pour le moment. Je veux garder mon blog bilingue, mais si j’ai des demandes pour traduire ces articles, alors je le ferai. :)
I am not an expert and I am still learning about light and colors.
This is about my color process for the illustration “Dino”. This is not a Photoshop tutorial. If your are interested, I’ll give you the links of the ones I used in another post.
The only thing I do when I paint digitally is use my knowledge from mixing real paint and use my eyes to make it work on the screen. I say that because I can’t properly mix colors in Photoshop :) I am still looking for a good way to do it. (Two complementary colors doesn’t make a neutral gray, but some brown instead.)
First, I worked out the tonal. I didn’t keep the layer in my file, but I did a super quick painting to work out the tonal. It is the gray equivalent of the color. For example, the gray equivalent of yellow is lighter than the gray equivalent of purple. Your colors will then read well in the illustration. It also makes sure the subject is the main focus and not a background element. You can solve a lot of problems with that step. So, with a program you can just desaturate your painting to check your grays and compare it with your gray sketch. With a real painting, I take a picture set on black and white and it makes it easier to figure out what needs to be fix.
Here, is the final illustration which I desaturated. You can see that the foreground is dark, the dinosaur is dark, the ground and the mountain in the back is lighter. I kept the grays of the foreground element close together to keep the interest on the dinosaur.
In this illustration, I used complementary colors. I didn’t choose all my colors at first, I just kept adding them as needed.
I like to choose a color that gives me the mood I want for the drawing. In this case I was thinking of dry land, so I chose some light orange. I made a layer under my drawing and covered the entire canvas with that color, like an underpainting.
(This is the light orange after I erased around the illustration.)
With that first color down, it gave me a reference point to choose all the rest of my colors. So I chose some blue-gray for the dinosaur which complement the light orange. I also wanted the background colors and the foreground colors to be the same. So my main subject is blue, and the rest is orange-brown.
I then used the tonal sketch as a reference for my color choices. I desaturated my illustration several times to compare the grays with the sketch.
For lighting, I just drew a little arrow to remind me of the direction of the light. I chose a 45 degree light from the top left. Now that I look at it, the shadow of the dino on the ground could have been way darker. It is barely visible.
For the shadows, I didn’t just add black. In the Color Picker, I moved the slider up or down to add interest. For example, I can make a dark blue more purple or more cyan. With real paint, I would add the complementary color for the shadows, but like I said earlier, I have a hard time mixing colors with computer programs.
So, this is the pallet I used. I made a very crude color wheel and in the middle are my colors for this illustration. As you can see, they are variations of blue and orange/brown.
If you are interested, I can make other posts like this. What would you like me to talk about? Was that an interesting post? Are my explanations clear? Let me know in the comments.
Tags: color, dino, Illustration, kristel mallet
Categories:
color, Illustration
