LESSON - Shape & Colour Perception (Patreon)

For artists, the act of seeing and perceiving is inseparable from the act of creating art itself. Whenever you make an artwork, you’re always using your sight, or your perception, to guide your hand and each one of your brush strokes.

Despite that, a lot of artists only focus on the creation aspect of art, and neglect to train their perception.

In this rather long and detailed lesson, I’m going to break down the two ways we perceive shape, the two ways we perceive colours, and how you can use those to improve the quality of your artworks.

Perception of Shapes

There are two major ways that a human perceives shape. The first one is 3-dimensional (3D) shape perception, which is more commonly used in real life; and the other is 2-dimensional (2D) shape perception, which I also call 2D Sight, which is less used in real life and more specialised for the purpose of art and other visual media.

With 3D shape perception, you’re perceiving shapes as objects with thickness, volume, and distance. You see the object as a 3-dimensional form as if it’s something you can touch (even when it’s on a 2D media, like a screen or on paper).

With 2D sight, however, you’re flattening down your perception into a 2-dimensional object. There’s no volume in the 3D sense, but objects do take up space on the 2-dimensional flat plane. 2D sight also takes away perspective in favour of 2D lines without any sense of distance.

Here is another example.

When using 3D perception, you would see two balls/spheres of roughly equal size. One is closer to you, while the other is further away.

But using 2D sight, you’re flattening it all down, until what you see is two circles of different sizes.

Of course, you’re never using ONLY one of these. By nature, the human eye sees in 2 dimensions, but the human brain gives it 3-dimensional context, resulting in a composite perception that combines both 2D and 3D.

So what’s the point of knowing these two?

As an artist, you will benefit from being able to switch between perceiving the 3D and the 2D.

The 3D perception is important because that is what your viewers will use when they look at your art. Your viewers will see things like the volume of objects/bodies/characters, the believability of the angles/distance/perspective, etc. And it’s the combination of these 3D elements that creates the illusion of reality in your art.

In contrast, the 2D sight is important because that is what you, the artist, are putting on the page. After all, your art is drawn on a flat canvas, and so it’s a matter of how you put 2D shapes within that canvas to create 3D-like elements.

Your ability in breaking down 3D elements that you see into 2D elements that you draw, is an integral part of your skills as an artist.

To use an example, hands are one of the most common problem areas for artists. As humans, using our hands as a 3-dimensional tool (to grab, to touch, to manipulate objects, etc.) makes us prone to perceiving it solely in 3D. However, due to the mechanical complexity of it, it ends up being very difficult to recreate on the canvas.

The solution?

By this I mean you’d want to temporarily remove the unnecessary elements from your brain. Thickness, volume, and distance doesn’t matter, just try to isolate shapes and lines on the 2D plane.

Not only is it easier to draw the hand despite its complexity, the 3D shape tends to appear even when you’re only paying attention to the 2D lines.

NOTE: This is not to be confused with simplifying the image into 2D shapes like squares and circles.

This is a different technique of its own, commonly used in animation or cartoon-style artworks, and is not immediately relevant in the subject of Perception. 

What I mean by isolating shapes in 2D is far more literal.

You’ll be amazed at how you can recreate complex 3D shapes by only paying attention to the 2D lines.

Why Train Your Perception

At this point you might ask, what’s the point of this? Is it all just for the purpose of recreating existing photos/art?

Not quite!

The purpose of training your 2D and 3D Shape Perception (and later Cognitive and Absolute Colour perception) is twofold. The first is to expand and deepen your visual library, and the second is to improve your ability to judge your own art.

First things first, a visual library is a collection of visual concepts that exists in your mind. If you can visualise and draw a buff guy from memory, it means you have the concept of a “buff guy” in your visual library. In contrast, if you can’t visualise and draw, say, a cacao fruit from memory, it means you don’t have the concept of “cacao fruit” in your visual library.

Whenever you make an artwork using your imagination, you’re channelling ideas from your visual library. However, how deep and how detailed is your visual library, really? You might know the general concept of what a “buff guy” looks like, but it might be a different story when you’re needing to channel the concept of, say, “buff guy sitting”, or “buff guy tied up”, or even “a buff guy’s thighs.”

Training your perception of these finer, more nitty-gritty elements of your drawing will help you to gain a better understanding of these concepts, and in turn, deepen your visual library. The more you make use of your perception to absorb information from references, the easier it is in the future for you to recreate those concepts without the need of references, which obviously can save you time and trouble, and expands the possibility of making more creative works via imagination alone.

Secondly, when you train yourself to perceive your references better, it also trains you to perceive your own art better. All artists have had those moments where they think, “Something about my work looks off…” but have no way of truly parsing what is off.

When you’ve spent time training your perception, it becomes easier to spot the exact elements that make the work look off. At first you might only be able to say “something about the abs look off.”, but later, you might have a sharper understanding, and be able to judge that the twist or crunch of the abs aren’t pronounced enough, or they’re not following the leaning gesture of the torso, or they’re disproportionately big, etc.

This is why training your perception is important.

Moving on to Colours!

Perception of Colours

Similar to shapes, there are two major ways that a human perceives colour. The first one is Cognitive colours, which is the default way that you perceive colour in real life, and the second is Absolute colours, which is a more advanced technique, and is useful for art.

Cognitive colour perception is how you can tell the colour of an object, regardless of lighting and other factors. It’s as simple as knowing if an apple is red or green, or if someone’s hair is black, blonde, or some other colour, and in this example, it’s knowing the pool table is blue, and the ball is white with a yellow stripe.

This is a basic, but useful way of perceiving colours. For anyone other than visual artists, this kind of perception is really all you need. However, for artists, this is often not enough.

This is also the reason why beginner artists, especially children, tend to colour artworks like this:

Now, Cognitively, the colours are correct. Grass is indeed green, and leaves are often a darker green compared to grass. However, any artist can tell you that while the colours are correct, they lack aesthetic impact, i.e. they’re not beautiful.

With this in mind, most artists would improve on their Cognitive colour perception by supplementing it with the perception of shadows.

And often, the immediate next step forward is adding in the perception of light/reflection.

Many artists can go far with these three methods of perception combined, especially if they refine their understanding of light and shadows to include how they interact with different colours. For example, how the vibrant blue felt of the table is reflected onto the ball in the example above.

With this perception, an artist would easily be able to paint like this:

And of course, this is already leagues better compared to the art made solely using Cognitive colour perception above. However, it is still constrained by the simplistic nature of the Cognitive colour perception. Grass is green, wood is brown, water is blue, end of story; but what if you wanted it to be sunset? Obviously you can no longer simply use green to colour the grass, but what colour do you even use?

This is where Absolute colour perception comes in.

Absolute colour perception is almost like seeing colours in 2D. You’re actively stripping away your cognitive understanding of what the object’s colour is, in favour of trying to gauge the Absolute colour that you are seeing.

For example, perceiving the white parts of the billiard ball above using Cognitive colour perception might go like this:

In contrast, using Absolute colour perception, it’s more like this:

As mentioned before, Absolute colour perception is an advanced technique, because in essence, you’re trying to colour-pick using your eyes and your mind.

Here’s another example, doing it on the yellow stripe, without using the eyedropper tool:

Compared to the real colours using eyedropper tool:

Naturally, there is no way to have 100% accuracy with this. Even for people who consider themselves masters in colouring, they might only get up to 75% accuracy, going the rest of the way using filters and other digital tools.

The goal here is more about understanding that Absolute colours create the illusion of Cognitive colours. This is how you can tell that the stripe is yellow, even though the real colours you’re seeing, the absolute colours, include oranges, browns, and even khaki greens and some pale purples; colours you won’t immediately associate with yellow.

Learning absolute colour perception involves expanding your understanding of what could represent a given colour, based on the context given. In one image, red might be represented by orange hues; in another, red might be represented by purples.

Oftentimes, when these unlikely colours are used in the palette, they create a more atmospheric and evocative visual experience, compared to using more expected colours in the palette.

Here’s an example, taken from the anime Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury

Note how the same skin-tone is represented using completely different colours in different scenes. In the first one, it’s pale and grayish, with an almost greenish shadow; in the second one, it’s more peachy, but with a slightly desaturated shadow; while in the last one, the base colour is straight up pink, with a deep magenta-brown shadow. Each of these combinations stem from the ambient light colours around the subject, creating the same cognitive colour experience using totally different absolute colour palettes.

Now to use a more practical example. Reusing the hand as a subject from the earlier topic, let’s say you wanted to draw a hand reaching for the skies. An artist using principles earned by Cognitive colour perception might colour it like this:

Which is certainly not a bad rendition. Tan skin colour, brown-ish shadows with some slightly bluish fill light, and blue highlights from the sky.

However, an artist with a well-trained Absolute colour perception, might end up with something like this:

Some of the colours here, like the greyish teal shadows, would be almost unthinkable to use when you’re basing your knowledge off of Cognitive colour perception alone, but when you expand your understanding, you’ll realise that teals and grays could very well represent shadows for a light tan skin, given the ambient colours around it. In other lighting situations, those shadows could instead be purple, or red, or green; likewise the base colour could be pink, or purple, or orange.

This is not to say that “colours arent real just go buckwild”, which, I mean feel free to, but my point is more about encouraging you to take a real close look at what you see every day. 

Look at your skin under a lamp, compare it to what it looks like under a midday sun. What’s the difference? Compare that to what it looks like during sunset, or at a restaurant, or at a club. What are the colours you’re seeing, really? It’s not just the same old colour, it could be oranges, and blues, and purples. Do the same with other objects. Do the same with photos on the internet, or scenes from your favourite movies, or artworks from your favourite artists.

The colours you THINK you’re seeing, might be composed of something completely different!

FINALLY, to loop back on the subject of rendering the riverside cottage scene during sunset, this is how I might approach it:

If you look at the palette on its own, you can see that a lot of the absolute colours here would not make sense at a glance. Pale green with grey shadows and yellow highlights to represent foliage? Orange, brown, and dark magenta to represent the roof? They seem like outlandish colour choices, and yet they work, because once again, the absolute colours come together to create the illusion of cognitive colours.

Learning Absolute Colour Perception

At this point, the HUGE question is: How do I learn Absolute colour perception?

And the answer is study. Study study study, LOTS of studies.

Take photos from the internet, take photos with your phone, take screenshots of your favourite live-action movies, and then recreate it in your own canvas. My personal recommendation is the movie La La Land, as it contains some of the most colourful yet moody scenes that I’ve seen in cinema.

Look at all those purples and browns that make up her pale skin, and all the dark blues that make up his white shirt!

Use the eyedropper tool at first, then try Not using the eyedropper tool next time. Be prepared to spend 3+ hours on each piece if you wanna be detailed about it, OR, just use colour blocks and get the general idea of the colour composition.

The point of studying this way is to get an understanding of what absolute colours would result in what cognitive colours. In a given lighting scheme, what would appear as yellow, red, or green? What would it mean to make the red darker, or lighter, or more saturated? What would it mean to make the yellow redder, or bluer, or grayer?

Here’s an example study I did back in 2021, reference is a photo by @briscoepark (who is sadly an NFT seller but credit where credit is due)

One of the main struggles of this piece was the red vending machine. When everything is tinted in cyan, the opposite of red, what colours do I even use to represent red, that will fit the entire atmosphere?

The red here ended up being a very dark maroon, with the brighter parts of the drink a brownish vermillion. Even the whites of the coca cola bottle is not at all white, but a medium teal-ish grey, while the black is a dark tealish grey.

If you know artists with particularly good colour design, you can study their works as well. I personally find that environment artists tend to do the most creative colour designs, and thus are the most worth learning from.

Conclusion

Perception makes up about half of the artistic process, and so there’s no overstating its importance.

When it comes to shapes, there is 3D perception used in everyday life, and 2D perception used by artists to parse images on a canvas. Honing both methods of perception will allow you multiple angles to approach drawing any given object, and thus make the artistic process easier.

Meanwhile, when it comes to colours, there is Cognitive colour perception used in everyday life, and Absolute colour perception which is an advanced skill used by artists. Absolute colour perception is important to learn, as it will open endless avenues for you to expand your creativity when applying colours to an artwork, allowing you to make far more impactful artworks.

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As always, if you have any questions, feel free to hit me up in the Art Labs channels in the AA Labs discord!