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Mt. St. Helens

(my script is in the alt text if ever the font is hard to read)

I’ve been getting a lot of asks wondering how I go about picking my colors for character designs, pages, backgrounds, etc, pretty much anything about color in general, and I figured in some attempt to try to answer them all at once, here’s my attempt at a color-centric art tutorial! I’m far from an expert on the subject, and I haven’t received any formal training on the matter, so this is entirely constructed of ideas I’ve gleaned from a bunch of snippets of different people’s advice over the years, studying other people’s art, and experimenting on my own to create something that works for me. Nonetheless, I feel passionate about the subject, and I hope this is able to help make color “click!” like a key in a hole for anyone who reads it. I had to discover my key-click moment on my own through trial and error, but i don’t believe in gatekeeping advice, so hopefully I can help you skip the trouble I went through lmfao.

None of this is meant to be like… a shaming or judgmental authoritative truth of “this is how it must always be done! anything outside of my vision is wrong and morally bad! Harrumph!!!” Especially since this is random shit I’ve figured out on my own with no formal training. It’s more just “if you are looking for something to ease your strain, perhaps this might help you give you what you need to have an easier time!” But most of the time I don’t even color my illustrations the way I do in this tutorial. Usually I try to balance & combine these principles with the “standard colors” that a scene is “supposed to be,” like if the ground is a concrete gray and the trees are green, I’ll keep them looking gray and green (depending on the lighting), but with the knowledge of “I want this to be a sad scene, so I’ll make the grays and greens lean heavily closer to blue, so the audience knows that it’s time to be sad.” Stuff like that. They’re cheat codes for strategic intent, not strict rules.

Now hopefully when it comes to covering more specific things, like how I design my characters, you guys now know the baseline foundation I’m running off of so I don’t have to explain all of this first before I get into the nitty-gritty hairs of “why I made this character purple and green vs why this character is blue and yellow” lmao.

Color is a hard subject to explain! Most of the color theory explanations I’ve heard primarily cover stuff like the science of reflecting light, then name drops all the famous kinds of color palettes, tells me what a cool vs warm color is, explains nothing else, and dips. Which, personally, has literally never been helpful for me when it comes to understanding why the fuck my painting should include the color blue in the shadows. Heaven forbid applying any of that shit to character design. Ough. No I had to figure that out on my own lmfao. So therefore this tutorial is more skewed towards that kind of perspective, someone who doesn’t really benefit (at least at this skill level) from the scientific cerebral shit. I want to know the why behind your creative choices!!! Tell me why the curtains must be blue!! That’s what’s important to me on a practical level. Dont get me wrong, I’m sure one day I’ll learn the purpose behind the scientific stuff, I’m sure there’s a reason behind it, but you’ve gotta figure out how to take the first steps at all to begin with before I can get to the master level stuff of like………scientifically understanding how bounce light works. And if we don’t understand why the curtains are blue, I don’t think we’re gonna get why the bounce light should be blue, too. So I wanted to explain it!!! I wanted to cover it!! Because I’ve never seen it explained before!!! And it’s important to know the why!!!

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