A bit of color theory + tips! 🌈 (Patreon)

Hey guuuys! How are you doing?! it's been a super busy week and I wanted to say hi and post something special for you!

First of all, I'm no expert in color at all and it's super hard for me to put into words what I've learned all these years but I'll try my best to talk through my experience! Sooo last week Malin asked me about what colors I chose to add little variations to my base colors. Like here, for example:

Quick note: this step is right before I add the shadows layer (which is a multiply layer on top)  you can have solid base colors which is perfectly fine or you can also paint base colors with a few color variations which will make the coloring more rich!

Anyways, it's SUPER common that the first thing we think when wanting to add variation aka highlights or shadows is going towards white for the highlights and going towards black for the darker colors, right? This is fine, you can do this, it's not wrong BUT you can make it look better. 

A quick, super easy revision to some color terms: 

So, based on those three terms, the first thing we think when coloring is doing it in base of the VALUE, amount of white or black. To make our colors look more interesting and interact better between them, I want you to start thinking in terms of HUE. 

This means that if you have a green as a base color, instead of choosing a normal, darker green for shadows, you can chose blue. If you have a yellow, chose an orange for the tone variation, not a "darker yellow". This will make colors not only more rich, but they will vibrate together and everything will pop. I did a chart explaining this that will hopefully give you a much better idea than my words:

Please note that there's no "wrong" of "good" and you can paint as you like, but I wanted to be graphically clear here.

 ✦ The base color in the middle of each color palette are both the same. 

 ✦ For the "wrong" color palettes, I took the base color and moved to white for highlights and went towards black for shadows. The result is not bad, but you can tell they are looking a bit boring.

 ✦ For the "correct" color palettes, I took the base color and changed a bit the tones/hues. I did small notes indicating to which colors I went for in each case. Colors seem to interact a bit better and there's so much brilliance between them. (specially the yellow-green-blue palette, urgh I love it)

Don't be afraid to EXPERIMENT! Never limit yourself to "the grass is green" or a "tree trunk is brown" no, you can have so many blue tones on the grass, and so many yellows! You can find endless different tones on a tree trunk, like violets, greens, earth tones etc. Of course, everything depends on the light and what kind of light source you have on your painting and some other things, but that's a conversation for other day because color theory is truly complicated and extensive and I want to keep it as simple as possible (because personally that's the way I like to learn, in a very simple and concrete way)

Anyways, hope this will help you to improve a bit our ways of thinking colors! If you feel like trying out this in your work, let me know! I'd love to see it and give you guys feedback. Madeline a lovely patron asked me about a discord channel and I really want to create one to grow our little community here, gotta do some research! 

Take care everyone and have a wonderful week ahead!

Love,

Gret