I relly love your color pallet whith your drawings. How do you pick so bright colours but still make them look good?
(I like your new profile picture btw)
OKOKOKOK SO! its not too complicated, once you get the hang of it you can translate the colors from normal to saturated pretty easy.
This is Caine with ‘normal’ colors
What you wanna do, is take each color that you have and make it as saturated as possible. If it’s black, you want to make it blue (or purple) and if it’s white, you want to make it turquoise (or yellow!)
I usually don’t use yellow as a replacement for white, but if I’m working with a lot of white all close together and I want to be able to differentiate, then I will. (For instance, Caine’s teeth and eyes. I want to be able to see clearly what each part is, so I made his teeth yellow and kept his eyes turquoise. It would also work the other way around, though because his eye is green, it may not translate as well.)
Now you may notice that his bow tie and pants look a little bit messy. This is where keeping your lineart separate comes in handy. If you’re working with blue, you’re gonna want to change the lineart of that area to purple instead. (and same for the other way around- if you’re working with purple, you’re gonna want your outline to be blue.)
If you didn’t want to make the outline purple for whatever reason, but also didn’t want to make your blue any lighter, then you’ll take your neon blue, and just.. darken it a smidge. Make sure to keep it at max saturation, just bring the brightness down until it’s dark enough to see, and that should work. That’s a helpful method if you’re drawing characters with both purple and blue colors, and you don’t wanna over complicate the lineart.
I didn’t bother changing the outline of his hat, because it’s simple enough so you can already tell what’s happening there.
If you want to get fancy with it, you can also change the rest of your lineart color too! Although for this particular drawing, most of it would end up purple.
Each color has its own ‘darker’ version that I would recommend using for its outline.
If this looks confusing, it’s really not! you just.. take your color and then make it warmer. (ignoring purple. purple’s outline needs to be cooler because if you make it warmer, you’d get pink. and pink is lighter. if your lineart isn’t darker than the color it’s outlining, it’s hard to read)
If you have two different colors touching, and aren’t sure which color to use for the lineart, go with the darkest one. For instance, Caine’s teeth have yellow and red touching. If I made the lineart by his teeth orange, it would blend in with the red of his gums and be unclear. So I would instead go with purple, because that’s what I would use for outlining his gums.
Now I should warn you about green.. it’s so annoying to work with. Whenever I’m drawing a primarily green character (COUGH RIBBIT COUGHCOUGHCOUGH) it can be so.. so annoying having to figure out what colors to use for rendering. The colors next to green on the color wheel are both very light, meaning if you want a slightly darker color to add some subtle shading, the best you have is.. blue. But the blue closest to it is so bright that it’s your substitute for white. So you have to make it even more blue, but if you go too blue then that’s your outline color, so you make it in between those two but for some reason, that blue feels so dull and not nearly saturated enough, and at that point it doesn’t even read as shading for green anymore.
Ugh. If you work with green, you get what I’m complaining about. Anyways, I have two workarounds for this.
One is focusing on the lighting rather than the shading. Use a more yellow-green to color the parts that would be lighter. Your original green will then kind of become your darker, ‘shading’ color.
Like so (makes whatever you’re drawing look very shiny lol!)
The other solution is to simply darken your green slightly. If you do this, I would recommend changing the hue to be *a little bit* more blue, I think that gives it more flavor, but that’s just personal preference!
I’ll usually do the second one, but there’s nothing stopping you from doing one or both or something entirely different. Whatever you think looks good.
OKAY with all that said, I’ll show one more example then I believe that’s all of what I have to say.
(note: I don’t usually start with non saturated colors, this is just for example purposes :-])
^ What the colors would ‘normally’ be
^ After shooting them with the saturation beam
^ After changing outline colors (hands +bow tie), adding shading, a background, and extra details (eye shine + arm markings)!
(In regards to backgrounds: I default to yellow/orange, or turquoise/blue, though I couldn’t tell you why. I try to pick a color that doesn’t match the character (I probably wouldnt pick a purple background for a Jax drawing, or a red background for Caine), and I also typically outline them in white. But.. also I don’t know how backgrounds work so tbh you gotta fend for yourself on that front. I’d recommend looking through @jaxlerzz ‘s art for background inspo, kit is really good with them!)
All in all, none of these are hard and fast rules. I think you should primarily have fun with it, these are just things that *I* have found enjoyable and get the results that I want. I encourage you to experiment with all of this, cause there’s no ‘right way’ to go about this! I learned all this through trial and error, my biggest recommendation is to just.. experiment. Mess around with things, there’s no rule saying that you have to do any or all of this, this is just how I personally go about things :)
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