#color tutorial

HEYY my 2nd color tips pdf is now available ! ^o^ hope you enjoy!

Hair Color Tutorial for Digital Artists using Procreate

Hey there!

I have to be honest that most of the time I don't actually know what I'm doing and that I have no idea how most of my pieces are gonna turn out. My work process is usually based on "Fuck around and find out", haha. I'm happy to know that it apparently doesn't come across that way, though.

A lot of it comes very naturally to me simply because I've been drawing non-stop for so long, but I can give you some small tips that really help me:

1. Have as many references as possible!

Here's what my reference sheet looked like for the Jayvik piece:

It helped me a lot to understand the overall color scheme I wanted to convey. Lots of very cold tones, pinks and very light blues and greens. These colours sorround Jayce and Viktor throughout all of season 2 and I wanted to keep them, especially since in my piece they are lying in the glowing hexcore.

Don't shy away from using references, get as many as you possibly can! Look at other poeple's art too and try to understand how they work with colours.

2. Work with complementary colours!

Since I paint a lot of romantic illustrations I want them to look pleasing and comforting, which I can accomplish by using complementary colours! You see this a lot with couples that are blue and red coded, for example. And I wanted to do the same thing in the Jayvik piece! For that I used the highlights in their hair!

Viktor's highlights are a soft pink hue.

While Jayce's are a soft blue hue.

The colour wheel works perfect for figuring out if two colors compliment each other because they are literally right across from one another!

3. It doesn't have to be true to life.

Pretty self-explanatory, but I thought I'd add it in here anyways. It's important to understand how colour and light works, but you don't always have to follow the rules. Does the rim light look cool but it makes zero sense? Who cares! Keep the cool rim light! Just have fun and fuck around.

4. A little trick to make your life easier!

I'm not excatly the best at colour theory, I still struggle with it quite a bit, but here's a little trick I like to use from time to time:

If you want all your colours to look coherent, take one specific color as your flat colour. Choose a hue that you would like your piece to have. Like this:

Now you choose whatever colours your characters have and paint them in. For example, here are the skin colours I chose for Jayce and Viktor:

Looks off, right? These colours don't fit the overall piece at all. So what do we do?

Turn down the opacity! It's that easy, wahoo!

I went from 100 Opacity to 72 for this specific illustration. And look at that!

It's so much nicer already! Now you know what colours to use as your actual flats! Just repeat this with every other part of your illustration and you'll have a great starting point. :)

made a rendering tutorial a bit ago since i had a few people asking about it. hope this helps!

How do you choose the colors you do :0? I am struggling with coloring choices in my own pieces and love how your art pops with different colors! Thank you :)

honestly doing studies helped me a lot more than anything else!! i rly recommend that everyone does studies and continues to do studies bc it helps u improve !

Colors and Character Design

Oooo good question! And perfect timing too-I’ve been updating the Key Art for my OCs and just finished the first two characters, who coincidentally are perfect for this as examples! I would use Anthea and COTL for this, but for color symbolism especially, using OCs rather than game characters with pre-set colors (aka Red for the Lamb’s cloak, White for Baal, Black for Aym, ect.) would be a lot better since while I can interpret the game designer's reasons they're not exact.

Picking Colors

Now, how do I pick colors? Typically I prefer jewel-tones for my palettes, so vibrant but not oversaturated, and somewhat dark but not muddy. I just like how they look for the most part. 

 Typically when working with a character, I usually set two things down first in their lineart-their skin tone and their hair color. The reason for that is its a LOT easier to pick colors when you know WHAT they’re going against because color is relative (meaning whatever colors are next to each other will slightly influence how they’re perceived as a whole), or at least in this case its easier. I typically know what skin tone my characters are going to have since I’ve had most of my main OCs for a decade now, though even if it's not a set in stone color I still at least place one down first then adjust down the line, like with Anthea and Narinder’s cameo in my Christmas piece I originally had their skin set as this olive-undertone one before warming their colors up after messing around for a bit with their clothes. 

Skintone is kinda really important to have the colors match (Or match with multiple skintones if its say, a uniform everyone wears for example) to avoid issues. It both helps the character look nice in their outfit, and avoids a Nasica and the Valley of the Wind situation where your character's pants are a bit too close to their skin color and make some poses awkward. 

(See how Nasica’s pants are a light cream color but her skin is a very light peach? Depending on the quality of the film scan/shot they can appear identical and make it look like she's wearing a short dress and nothing underneath)

Anyway, with Chrysa and Leo, who you'll see shortly, their characters have been with me for a decade, so whenever I redesign/update their looks I kind of already have a set skin/hair for them. Chrysa’s meant to be very pale with red hair, while Leo has a warm tan and brown hair. I also never use pure white for eyes whites/teeth, and instead lower the opacity down to like 70-80 to let the skin tint it a little, this is just to help keep it from being too sharp. After skintone and hair are down, it’s onto Theme Color. 

Theme Colors

It’s very common in media for certain characters to have a ‘theme’ color, so a color they’re always wearing/associated with. Sonic the Hedgehog is blue, Toriel is purple, and Steven Universe is pink. Now this isn’t always the case, the girls from the 90s version of Sailor Moon for example wear a bunch of colors like most people do for every-day looks, but in character design if your character primarily has one outfit it’s good to pick a main color, and especially one that matches them.

Colors have meanings both positive and negative beyond just the chart above (and there are a lot of different takes that can even vary from culture to culture), like how Red is passion/anger in the west, but in China represents joy and prosperity. Your character doesn’t have to match every one of those meanings for them to use that color though. For Chrysa and Leo here:

Chrysa: Purple meaning Royalty, Mystery, and Compassion   Chyrsa’s a princess who’s been exiled and disgraced since she was born, she has a whole lot of mystery surrounding her purpose in life and just what she is (as she has magic and abilities most mortals typically don’t-which spoiler alert she is only alive as the the result of some godly intervention via a pact between the Goddess of Death and a dishonest queen), and her greatest strength is her kindness and compassion towards others regardless of who they are. She also has a sub-theme color in pink (so her secondary color) because of its association with youth, since Chrysa's isolation left her rather not so much naive but unaware of the outside world, which gives a lot of her morals and beliefs this youthful optimism. Leo: Green meaning Nature, Growth, and Selfishness  Leo’s the healer of the party who is more knowledgeable of the world around them both in regards to the kingdom they’re in (as he was raised by his mother a nomadic healer and traveled alongside her), and in regards to being more aware of the fae most mortals overlook. He’s got this unassuming look where his clothes don’t fit him right and a boyish face that makes it clear he’s got some growing up left to do when combined with his attitude, and especially at first Leo is rather selfish with others, often keeping his travel experience to himself when the party struggles in hopes they’ll give up their quest. (mainly due to having little faith left in their situations improving, kid's a huge pessimist)

Those are Chrysa and Leo’s basics, but that’s not all I was thinking about with their colors. While you can just leave it at that, I do have more reasons why I picked the shades/placements I did. Connecting the colors to where they’re placed on the design and why something is the way it is can be super important too. Heck, even where the outfit came from in-lore can be important too sometimes.  So congrats, you’re getting a mini character design lecture too I guess? Really this is me just taking the excuse to talk about the little things I did with my OCs’ designs here lol, but its somewhat relevant so trust me. Also as usual you can see more of OC stuff here @illustratemuse

Also I was gonna go into Leo too, but to not go on for long we'll just look at Chrysa's today.

Symbolism and Connections to Design

For Chrysa her entire character centers around being ‘inbetween’ life and death. As a girl raised in isolation not really wanted by anyone after her mother died in childbirth, she never had the chance to ‘live’ when all she wondered was why she hadn’t ‘died’. Chrysa basically has no opinion on if she lives or dies, and just wants someone to straight up tell her what to do since she doesn't know what either fully mean. (Just what does life have to hold? Just what peace does death offer?) Thus her colors I specifically chose based off twilight, that time between day (life) and night (death).

She’s also meant to resemble both a nun (as the story follows her becoming a Priestess of Death and the nun appearance is a quick shorthand glance for ‘oh she’s the priestess of this adventure party’ to the audience) and a bride crossed with a mourner-that bride part because another element of her character is how a lot of people place her mother's image over her, down to even misremembering her mother’s slightly sharper and at times angrier face to instead being as soft and gentle as Chrysa’s. And what is often viewed as pure in regards to woman? Being a bride-whose dress can easily be recolored into a mourner's if you change the fabric from white to black. Her mother’s death haunts her despite her having little emotional connection to the woman, and thus that’s how she’s dressed, a pure white bridal gown beneath a mourner's garb for a mother she never knew.

Now Chrysa isn’t a bride and is not getting married, but that imagery is still there since for a lot of the story it’s other people giving Chrysa her outfits, so it's like they're trying to recreate either that image of Chrysa's mother on her wedding day or her funeral, though I used the darker purples mostly since again the twilight nod as well as simply to make her look more vibrant, especially with her hair. Were Chrysa's outfit actually black she'd stick out too much when placed alongside her party.

Chrysa’s colors are very dark clothing-wise, so we're naturally drawn to her pale face and bright, vibrant red hair. Red like her mother’s blood. Red and curled like the threads of life she cuts as a priestess. So bright and alive unlike the rest of her appearance, yet covered by the only actual black garment on her, the veil. (which note that it’s not pure black but instead a very dark purple-I recommend using a dark version of a color that appears black since it helps match nicer). For the veil, Chrysa’s outfit was from her maternal aunt who becomes her mentor as the only other Priestess of Death, a woman who tries to pretend that she sees only Chrysa and not the sister she lost. And yet what does she give her niece upon first meeting? A veil. And what was Chrysa’s mother’s hair? Long, black, and straight. Chrysa’s key defining trait, the one thing people cannot place her mother’s image over, the trait they cannot soften/alter in memories, was her hair, yet here it is covered in a way that still gives Chrysa her mother’s silhouette/hides that red. 

Extra

Another little note is that if two or more characters are meant to go together check their colors side by side and adjust as needed! I usually line everyone up like this at the end to check them all over. Also at least for me, I have certain color types for certain materials that are the same for ALL characters in a cast. In my OC cast, metals like gold, silver, and iron are the same, as well as anything that’s white cotton or linen, since it helps unify the group. You can do leather too, but since leather can be dyed or colored you can honestly mess with its appearance to, that’s what I do where I tint the leather to match the theme color.

Conclusion

1. How do you do backgrounds?

2. How do you do colouring? Like with Violetpaw, who's described as a black and white cat. I literally thought she was purple initially, but I realised cats can't actually be purple. I saw your Die Young animation before actually reading all the books (there are like a million books, and books are expensive, please bare with me). Anyways, I love your style! I think your Violetpaw design is really cute:)

QUESTION 1: (i also answer the second Q its just at the end of the post!)

If you had asked me about how to do backgrounds like a year ago I wouldn't have answered because I didn't really have a process besides fiddle around and hope and pray LOL but! now I've figured out a way I like to do it so here we gooo

I'll be using this commission I did as an example! I've also JUST posted a speedpaint of it here (lucky that i was working on this bg heavy piece when i saw ur ask!)

Cont. under the cut! ⬇️

commission info || ko-fi (tip jar)