chasing daybreak

I can’t have caffeine too late or I can’t sleep at all, and I really wish I could. 😆 Even tea in the afternoon can keep me up!

Thinking about art again means thinking about color again. To me.

I know color is something some artists struggle with and I wonder if color is intimidating to those artists because they don’t know where to start.

And honestly, outside of a few exceptions, I always start with “normal” colors! I want to make sure I get the values of the skin/hair/clothes/whatever right in relation to each other before I get weird.

And then I start pushing. I play with overlay modes and curves and hue/saturation until I get the right look for what I’m going for. And then those are the colors I use for the rest of the drawing process.

what is the environment?

Questions I always ask myself is “what is the environment?” even if I don’t show much environment. Is it a dark cave? Is it a sun-drenched field at sunset? That’s going to influence the overall color of the scene.

fig 1. Amory and the Cooler Amory

My character Amory is in a dark area. The environment is cool toned with no outside light to shift the temperature. Amory’s appearance is going to be influenced by this environment.

From her base colors, I started shifting them cooler using overlay layers and playing with contrast and saturation until I got the look I wanted. She now looks like she is in a cool, dark cave.

fig 2. (kissy faces)

Avi’li and Eren are riding through a field at sunset. Because of physics, sunsets skew red and pink and orange. This is going to influence what these two look like.

From their base colors, I shifted them to a warmer temperature. Both characters are cooltoned, and their appearance is going to be on the cooler side of warm, so pink. I used an overlay layer of just pink, and played with the opacity of that over the base colors until I got a look I was happy with.

tldr

Experiment with layers of color at different overlay modes!

Take the dominant color of the background (blues for dark caves, pinks for romantic sunsets)

Fill an entire layer with it on top of your base colors

Play with the overlay mode

Fill another layer with another color, set it to a different mode

See how those colors interact with each other and what they do to the base colors

Play with curves and saturation as you adjust overlays