Do you have any coloring tips? I'm trying to get better at coloring but it's hard :/ everything looks so out of place and I lose motivation fast
By no means am I an expert on this (I still forget to choose a light source 90% of the time) but here's a few things that I do when I'm colouring something digitally. Remember these are all individual to the way I make art so they may not all be applicable to yours and are simply me explaining how I do colours, not a tutorial for all colouring styles.
Buckle up folks, this one's a long one (sorry in advance!!)
Losing motivation is totally normal and okay, take a break if you need it, maybe send it to some friends for some hyping up (art servers full of other artists are great for this!). Colours ain't gonna look perfect first time you try to do them, I never put down a colour that I like first time, it takes some messing around and asking friends for me to get them down.
So don't feel pressured to get them perfect in the beginning, that rarely happens!
Here's a mini explanation of how I do my colours, hope it will help a little :)
1) GET THOSE BASE COLOURS IN!!
It doesn't matter if they're not exactly what you're going for rn, go with roughly the colour you want and start there! Personally, I do big blotches of colour just to get something down on the page as this helps me want to actually finish it. Then you clean up those edges so they're all in their correct spaces.
I've found that working on a neutral mid-tine grey background helps you see the colours best at the start so all of my 'paper' starts off grey when working digitally.
Here's the example I'm going to be using (this is from the ghost files fanart I'm working on)
2) ADJUST THOSE COLOURS!!
So, now you've got those colours down, you can adjust them to be roughly how you want them to look. If you're unsure on what colours look best together, you can either take some time out, find some YouTube channels and learn a little about colour theory... OR you could grab some colour pallettes from online and have a play around with gradient maps or simply placing the colours in yourself. There's no shame in using resources like those, that's literally what they're there for.
I didn't need to do this on this drawing as I was happy with the colour selection. This is because I chose the background colour and simply adjusted the hue and saturation slightly until I got the colours I wanted. This is my general technique for choosing colours as my work tends to be fairly similarly coloured (browns, oranges, reds, yellows with hints of purple)
Right, well done! You've got your base colours in.
...but oh god, what now?? They look so flat and lifeless, what shall you do?!
This, my friend, is where shading comes in. It's both a way of telling the viewers where the light and shadows are, can change the mood of the drawing, can change what we feel about a character or it can just look real pretty but shading and lighting does all sorts of fun things to a drawing.
If your style is more simple and doesn't require shading/has minimal shading: apply this tip to any shading you do have and don't forget the importance of rim lighting in simpler styles.
For shading both skin and clothes, I use the original colour, shift it down into a darker shade and on the colour wheel I shift it down too (eg. shading green with blue, red with purple) sometimes you can shift that even further to create similar shading to the one above, where I shaded orange/brown with pinks/purple's.
The principle is the same with highlights but like,,, opposite. Shift everything up, shade browns with yellows, blues with greens, etc.
SIDENOTE ON HOW I COLOUR SKIN:
Okay so, these next two paragraphs are based entirely from what I've learnt during studies and aren't rules, just simply how I do it.
For lighter skin tones, I tend to start from one of the lightest colours and shade darker, like you would if you were working with something like watercolours. This allows you to build up shadows in areas of darkness. Once you've done the shadows, you can then go in and add highlights and lighter sections where necessary.
For darker skin tones, I tend to start at one of the darkest values, as dark skin tends to reflect light differently to light skin. Then I add lighter shades in sections that the light would reflect. You can add shadows too, I tend to add them if the drawing still feels flat after doing the highlights.
3) OVERLAY + MULTIPLY LAYERS ARE YOUR BEST FRIEND
These things are literally lifesavers for me, I love an overlay layer.
I can't really explain what they actually do so I'm not even gonna try, just play around with them. But using a purple/blue multiply layer and erasing where the light hits, that makes the illusion of full shading without the same effort of painting in the shades.
Overlay layers are 100% a 'fuck around and find out' resource, I tend to use red and pink overlay layers as my colours tend to be more desaturated and this helps with brightening them up. However they can also be used to change the genre/mood of the drawing, like this:
These two drawings are the exact same. There's no difference between them other than an overlay gradient map layer in green or sepia. (These gradient maps are built into clip studio paint, I'm not sure about other programs)
But the whole vibe is completely different. So yeah, fuck around with different colour schemes and overlay layers (the bi flag colours are a great choice for experimenting with overlays as the colours are naturally very harmonious so maybe start there.)
You can also try a noise later for a bit of texture, it's my go-to fix it for any drawing ngl
Uhhhhh, yeah. That was lengthier than I expected, hope it helps even in the slightest. As I said at the top, I am by no means an expert and am still figuring things out myself, so just fuck around and find out.
