.: SELF PROCLAIMED NO.1 SZK HINOMORI OSHI :.

When choosing color palettes in general, saturated or not – the important thing you need to remember is how at the end of the day – it’s relative. It’s something you primarily see in pieces with one dominant hue (see exhibit a and b), where colors that appear to be complimentary to the dominant one are usually far closer on the color wheel than you would expect. Your brain just automatically fills in the information based on the contrast.

This matters because when painting (traditionally or digitally) – contrast is your key. It’s your best tool for telling the viewer where to look. In the aforementioned Shizuku card you can see how the background is blurred out, the colors that contrast the most are present on Shizuku herself cause she is what you are supposed to be looking at.

So, point is – everything you draw and color exists within relation to each other. The same way when you change the angle of a character’s torso you have to redo the arms, when you want to change your colors you need to do so from the ground up (or when drawing a scene with a background for that matter since the light source matters a lot), otherwise you’ll likely end up with something like this (exhibit c).

The question becomes – what do you to avoid it? And to that my answer is - well, it's complicated. But personally I like to choose a base tone that also settles the overall mood (first with the canvas background, then for the character itself) – for this guy for example I wanted to keep things lively and warm, so I chose to base his palette off of yellow, rather than the creamy red-brown that he has in the original sketch. The stuff on screen is (I hope) self explandatory enough.

If you struggle with seeing the contrast I recommend using an achromatic overlay (w/ saturation set to 100%) to turn your canvas into grayscale. That and playing around with the hue slider more than you normally would – your base colors will likely stay within the upper half of both the saturation and brightness sliders, so using different hues becomes your best bet for variety.

Adding shading is really just building on top of the same principles as when choosing the base – use temperature differences between hues to your advantage. Except this time you will also adjust the brightness and saturation more.

I'm sorry if it's giving "draw the rest of the owl" but truth be told if you know how to shade I don't need to tell to you that "if the light goes there it will be brighter, if it doesn't the spot will be darker", I will try to elaborate as best as I can on the specifics though.

I tend to start with my general shading already kind of present throught gradients/airbrushes and blending modes as a general direction that locks in the shapes. (Multiply, Overlay and Soft/Hard Light are the ones I like the most but it depends)

Then it's rendering time! You can use layer modes just as well as they are more efficient but if I'm really trying to nail the colors I will often paint over the character with the one I want to use for shading (in this case it was fuschia for shadows and bright yellow for the lit areas), then I colorpick the colors I get and adjust them to my liking. Unfortunately I don't have a good rule for this outside of "if closer to the light source/brighter make it closer to that color and if it's in shade then do the opposite". Sometimes I mess around and add more colors like in the hair, sometimes I leave it plain and less detailed. I try not to stray too far away from the base palette but sometimes doing so might just be what you need to do, so my best advice would simply be to experiment with it. And blending modes do help, it just depends on how you implement them.

And at the end of the day, the world is your oyster. I know I with my work I usually use warm tones but you can go for cool ones just as well. This is just how I usually operate and understanding color theory is important, but how you implement it is up to you. If art history interests you - I recommend checking out fauvists like Henri Matisse and especially Andre Derain, they really liked their colors haha. Hope this helps and wasn't too much of a drag :3