#colour tip

DISCLAIMER: These are my own personal preferences, not set rules!

If you want to highlight or mute out certain colours in your picture, overlay/soft light helps with that! [YES I LOVE OVERLAY AND SOFTLIGHT]

For example, if you have a picture where you really want to accent the red, set a layer over your image -> set to overlay or soft light -> fill it in with brown, tan, muted orange.

* Filling it in with shades of red tends to be overkill, because it morphs the other colours in your piece to reflect red and it tends to look icky. Personal preference though.

* To MUTE red, you can fill your overlay/soft light layer mode w/ shades of blue.

* Blue in general is very good at muting/desaturating an image. It tones down warm colours, such as red, very well.

* Blue is also good for bringing out green hues. This is because blue is very close to green on the colour wheel so it complements it very well.

*Yellow is also good for bringing out green hues. Yellow is close to green on the colour wheel.

*Brown is very good at warming up an image in a vintage-y sort of way. I find that very light brown is good at tying colours together without actually warping the image's original pallet. If you want blue to be the focal point of your image I don't recommend adding a brown overlay/soft light layer because it will warp the blue into a warmer purple. Why purple? Because purple is a warmer variation of blue due to its closer proximity to red.

*Adding a grey overlay/soft light layer helps saturate/up the contrast of your original colour pallet.

*If you use purple/pink/green/yellow I recommend using a very muted shade and/or lowering the opacity, because these pigments can severely warp your original colour pallet. [but I still recommend trying it out just to see what works for you]

If you guys ever feel like your picture's colours aren't unified:

1)just create a new layer over your image, fill it with whatever colour you want [really depends what your going for, trial and error yaya] and then set the layer to overlay or soft light and reduce the opacity of said layer if you want.

2)You can also create a new layer, fill it with a colour, and set it to 'colour' layer mode. This pretty much immerses your picture COMPLETELY into the the colour of your choice.

ex) you choose blue, -> colour mode -> everything will be blue. Black -> dark blue, light pink -> light blue.

You can lower the opacity so it doesn't completely mute out your original colours. Then create a new layer and set it to overlay or softlight, and brush on colours. This technique can help if you're drawing a piece where the environment's colour pallet is predominant. ex) it's a cold icy cave and very blue, you want the people in the cave to meld in with the blue and not stand out too much.

I think I'm going to elaborate on each 'tip' later on or something. OH I'M SORRY GUYS, BUT I LOVE TALKING ABOUT COLOURS LOL.

So uh I decided to talk about choosing saturated or bright colours.

Deciding on your piece's overall colour pallet

1) PREDOMINANTLY NEUTRAL PALLET + 1 SATURATED/BRIGHT COLOUR

This will look pretty good 90% of the time.

When I say neutral I mean very muted shades that veer towards the grey/white/black side of the spectrum. Because such shades lack pigmentation they will not compete with the hyper pigmentation of a bright colour.

Another reason why this 'rule' tends to work is that it minimizes your piece's overall colour pallet.  IN GENERAL you want mm..no more than 3-4 main colours in your piece's colour theme. Note that this doesn't mean you must limit the number of shades of colours you want to use.

Having trouble choosing bright colour combos?

2) PRIMARY COLOURS, DO NOT FORGET.

Yes, red, blue and yellow seems incredibly boring but if you're seriously having a colour block, this trio won't fail you. Wondering why this combo works so well? Blue is a cool colour, red is a warm colour, and yellow can pair with cool and warm colours because of its ideal-middle-place position in the colour spectrum. It's a balanced combination.

I actually don't like using straight up red, blue, and yellow. >_> But I'm guilty of abusing variations of this three-colour-combo.

The first combination: coral, yellow-cream, and robins egg blue is a particular favorite of mine.

*Coral is essentially red with a orange-pink tone to it*

*The yellow-ish cream is basically a more muted yellow [I find that muted yellow tends to complement other colours more easily due to less pigmentation]

*The robins egg blue has turquoise/green undertones but it's still in the cold/blue side of the spectrum so it works with the coral.

How to choose colours for subtle colouration.

3) Look at your colour wheel if you are stumped. When you want to add subtle shades of colour to make things interesting, I find that pigments situated closely to your main colour work best.

ex) The main colour of this leaf is an olive shades with yellow undertones. From looking at the wheel you can see that shades of yellow and orange are very close to the primary olive-green hue of the leaf.

I particularly like adding yellow and orange because they are warm colours, so they pair nicely with the olive green, which is a borderline cool colour [green is more 'cool' than 'warm', note how it is closer to blue than it is to red]

4) EXPERIMENT AND FEEL FREE TO BREAK GUIDELINES.

Duh..it's art.

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If you guys have any requests for mini tutorials or whatever, feel free to drop a suggestion in my ask box.

Meanwhile I'm going to waste more time cooking up another batch of these things because pretending like I know what I'm talking about feels good. JK..hehehe.