Bunch Of Arts ‘n Half-finished Sketches

Compiled some basic information I know about drawing fat characters for beginners since I've been seeing more talk about absence of really basic traits in a lot of art lately.

with specifically the highlights and colors being hues that compliment each other, don’t distract from the scene, and make it more interesting/visually appealing

cohesive but still contrasting

This kind of talks about color and composition

This is a bit about landscape specifically

Values & composition

Contrast in composition

Balance in colors & values

This one's more for palette building but I think it's useful and can be applied to the other ones

Cohesion within compositions/lighting

"Chromatic fringe" - I also see people using this with shading, they bring in a transition color that is a different hue than the base color or shadow, it makes it so that less vibrancy is lost and it doesn't get muddy!

This one specifically has a lot of process behind the style of painting you're looking for!

Also one of my favorite artists who makes bright and colorful art like this is Not Sorry Art on TikTok & YouTube, her website is here and it's<3 my fav. She has some videos where you can see her process

James Gurney's Gamut Masking article (be sure to click through to the end)

Another post by him on the same topic

Yet another of his (reproduced with permission) - he literally wrote the best book on the subject if anyone wants a longer explanation of this

Cynthia Sheppard's limited palette video - it's a video and she does spend a bit of it with medium-specific information about oil paints but she has a very soothing voice and watching her paint is mesmerizing. While she goes duller rather than brighter with her limited palettes, I really think it helps to keep things simpler and easier to understand, you can always go the opposite direction once you understand the principles

I noticed a few replies in the notes were especially upset by color wheels and common color schemes (like the sets below)

and I hope the above explanations are helpful for understanding why those are often taught as a beginner explanation when they’re almost unusable for most beginners by being both too simple and also not really successfully bridged through to the higher level stuff. The reality is simply that you do have to have the color wheel in some capacity - even just mentally - (and if you’re working traditionally, that means you need to know how to mix colors to make one) but it’s because the goal is to start playing with it and blocking off parts of it!

But once you do that, the struggle becomes as much about how to pick those color schemes and how to keep them working internally. Which is where a lot of the concepts about “warm” and “cool” start to come in. Because those are often taught as “half the color wheel is one or the other” you can’t really apply it straight from there. In order to apply this stuff successfully, you have to start thinking about the perceived warmth or coolness of colors next to each other to make stranger and more vibrant palettes work.

It may seem irrelevant to talk about values here, when the subject is color, but so much of getting color to work at more advanced levels comes down to controlling your values better and better.

Here's one that gets into value ranges

This one by Jon Neimeister: