lighting tips

awanqi:

Thank you so much! And to compliment my color, that’s kind of surprising lol because to be honest color is something I struggle with a lot, and oftentimes I end up really disliking my color palette that I’d used in my artwork… So I wouldn’t completely rely on what I say if I were you, since I’m also still learning, but take what you can from this 🙂

here are some tips that I keep in mind when painting (though I could definitely use some help as well haha…)

•keep colors moving: don’t think that there’s only one color in certain places like in shade or in light, it may not be glaringly obvious but one color almost never stands alone; it’s always supported by the colors surrounding it. To be more specific, James Gurney’s Color and Light book says that “colors can be understood only in relation to each other and that no color exists in isolation”. So what looks blue may not actually be blue, it might be a really desaturated green next to a really saturated orange or some other warm color, and vice versa.

•grey is more nice to use than you might think: I use it a lot to balance my colors, for example the general rule of cool light and warm shadow/cool shadow and warm light, I usually use a more grey shade of a color to tone down some spots if they’re too saturated. Also, if you use the desaturated versions of a complementary color on a more saturated color, you’ll get some type of blue. In the most basic terms, if you have a really strong yellow or orange and you put a really desaturated green or green blue, it’ll look blue, and that kind of thing is what I go for instead of putting an actual blue on a strong yellow/orange, since that’d only make it look garish.

•value is equally, maybe even more so, as important as color, if your values are not working or not believable then most likely your colors will also end up that way. However, in my case in the past I often had too much contrast between values where it shouldn’t have been, like a cloth fold shadow would be too dark and the light hitting it to bright, and my clothes/skin/etc ended up looking like it was made of rubber or plastic or some other gross shiny thing that wasn’t supposed to be shiny.

•I also implement broken color (“placement of adjacent strokes of contrasting hues which mix vibrantly in the eye”, also covered in Gurney’s book) to add that vibrancy. It can be found in Impressionist or probably early 20th century illustrations/paintings, a good example of that is The Loneliness of Peter Parrot by Walter Everett, or any of J.C. Leyendecker’s paintings.

•limited palette: in general, using colors from all over the color wheel could turn out very badly, depending on the circumstances. Try not to overdo colors, for me; I either keep one color strong and the complementary of that color weak, or I use an analogous palette so it doesn’t look boring, stuff like that.

So yeah, this probably doesn’t need to be said, but I recommend you give Gurney’s book a read, and also to learn more about color theory. I’m not a professional (here’s the disclaimer lol), and this only applies to what I specifically find helpful for me, not every artist there ever was, so take my info with a grain of salt 🙂 hope this helps!