I just stumbled upon your account and find myself completely in awe of your art style; it scratches my brain in such a specific way.

I've always wanted to make my illustrations more colorful and visually interesting, but whenever I add color it feels like I'm filling in a coloring book, rather than filling a page cohesively with color.

so I was wondering if you have a tip or two for filling an illustration completely with bold & primary colors, maybe a bit of insight into your process??

hey and thank you so so much for this ask... you just made my day :-) this means a lot to me

and to answer your question... i really do fill some of my drawings like coloring books! just trying out colors that i like and seeing how good they go together. but most of the times i use complementary colors, i really just look at the color wheel and choose whichever color is the opposite to the one i used last time and go with it. thats why for example the shadows on my drawings are always purple or blue... to complement the red or brown skin.

with a more realistic artstyle its much more complicated obviously, but i really recommend watching some videos or maybe even reading a book on color theory, thats what i did and it helped me a lot! even watching a tutorial and following it in real time helps a lot to understand what youre doing with your drawing/painting and why youre doing it. but i really do think that learning about complementary colors was a major breakthrough for me because i use them everywhere, either to make my drawings look better or to add some symbolism to the characters!

but talking about a bit more weirder, digital style,.. i usually just go with the most saturated colors, like literally, and i choose a palette of three or four colors and use only them, sometimes in different tones.

heres for example a drawing with just the RGB scale (and black&white):

and this one here is also just the RGB scale but i used different shades and tones of red, blue, and green. thats why vriskas hair stands out so much here, because its the only object thats not red, blue or green here... its like... greenish yellow... i think i wanted it to look greener, but i didnt really care because it doesnt look bad! thats just how you do it sometimes... you just go with the flow.... I guess...

also should be said that i use monochrome scales sometimes, which is the easiest for me personally because its essentially just one and a half colors and you can just use a gradient map tool.

speaking of tools... i really just use as many tools as i can! after finishing a drawing the real artistic process just starts for me... i rreeeeally love using overlays, just adding random stuff to random layers, i also love the perlin noise and mosaic tools, i like to use halftone brushes and put them on overlay layers, and of course i always mess with the curves, i really dont put much thought into this process i just add whatever wherever! and i also really try not to leave a single blank space on the canvas. i really just like it when everything is filled up. and i also love to write something on my drawings, just add some words or maybe even a full ass text, and it doesnt always have to make sense, but i think at the end of the day every single thing you put on your drawing will make sense to a person looking at it on the other side of the screen.....