#sketchmre tutorial

GENERAL RULES

I think the first thing to know about my process is that I'm weirdly strict with the colors I use? I see people who color pick and wiggle the color around a bit each time and it's really cool! But my brain doesn't like me doing that, so it makes most of my color palettes a pretty closed ecosystem.

As a overview, I have 3-4 "types" of colors with their own color gradients. Be aware of tone! Don't make the types of colors the same tone. Additional colors are made from combining the types. I use 25-75% opacity for new colors instead of blending them.

This is a good example of the closed ecosystem concept:

My 3 types of color are brown, green, and pink. The circles of colors are the ones I manually picked from the color wheel. The rectangular blocks of color are the new, in-between colors.

Something to note is that my new colors aren't 25% opacity, then 50% opacity, then 75% opacity. I draw a rectangular strip of the base color and draw over it with a 25% opacity brush. Then, I draw over half of that again with the 25% opacity brush. I keep doing this until I'm satisfied with my colors.

This character is a dryad and I wanted to add more interest to the bark skin, so I used the pink for some highlights. The brown and pink are both warm colors and it made the most sense to use them together. This is how it looks without the pink accent:

It ties the brown and pink together pretty nicely, right? I usually do this because I don't really like having two types of colors that are very similar in hue. If I have a pink-red color, then all pink-reds in the piece should be a color from its gradient (or a new color made from it). This makes sure all colors in the piece have a distinct relationship to each other.

(If I'm drawing something that's predominantly one or two hues, the threshold for merging colors is higher)

If that's not the case, then I prefer to manually include a gradient relationship. This particular instance was a little weird, where the brown seems more red than it is. It's actually an orange, but because I never used a medium or light toned variant of the color it just seems red. Changing its hue to pink would be pretty noticeable, so I chose to use the gradient method here.

Here's some other examples with the types explicitly added

and some with just the swatches

As a rule of thumb, there are usually at least 3 types of colors: skin, hair, and clothing base colors. Skin and hair are generally unique, but not always.

CHOOSING GRADIENT/SHADING COLORS

This might change in the future (i want to experiment), but most of the time* when choosing my shading colors I move counterclockwise from lightest to darkest.

I originally started doing this because I use the same color for skin shading as the blush, which was tinted red. In general, this works pretty well because when moving counterclockwise from yellow the average tone of the color decreases. Purple has the darkest tone, so red/blue/purple are often my darkest colors.

*There are exceptions to this, particularly when I'm using green or blue-green. If that's the case, then I do the same thing but clockwise. Purple is still my darkest value.

It's a personal preference, but I very rarely use a yellow as the light color in a shading gradient moving towards green. You'll usually see me use yellow and then move towards orange/red OR use a yellowish green and move towards blue/purple. I'm not the biggest fan of yellow-green and use it extremely sparingly. Consequentially, this does pretty distinctly separate my warm and cool colors. It's not intentional lol

HUE RELATIONSHIPS

To be honest, I usually have two types of color schemes: Boldly different colors or similar colors with a bold accent.

If anyone has seem my art then they know i LOVE a good contrasting color scheme. I know there's actual contrasting colors-- yellow-purple, orange-blue, red-green-- but in this context I'll be using "contrasting color" to refer to the actual contrasting color and it's immediate neighbors. For example, red and blue would be contrasting in this context. Red and purple would not.

The reason I want to make this definition is because I think that you can get the same visual impact of actual contrasting colors as long as a color is the opposite mood (warm/cool) AND not next to the base color. Using the same example, red would be a warm color with green as its actual contrasting color. Yellow is also warm, so we can't use that despite it being green's neighbor. Blue works. Purple is red's neighbor, so we can't use that despite it being a cool color.

Here's some examples of color schemes with really prominent contrasting colors:

For purple/orange

For red/blue

For pink/green

As for the other type of color scheme, it's 2 or 3 neighboring colors and a contrasting color (which is usually very saturated)

In some cases, the "contrasting color" is just a very light grey/white

In both cases, you just need a color that pops from the rest! Because my color palette is so limited, this accent color ends up being used for jewelry, trimmings, embroidery, etc. It helps tie everything together.

FINAL NOTES

I can (and will!) break the rules established here. I experiment, I make the objectively bad decision, I want to try other things. That's art. If you find something here that's interesting, try it out! Make it your own! (maybe tag or dm me, id love to see it)

Honestly, it’s been pretty interesting so far! A couple tips that I’ve learned so far:

For watercolor (in clip studio paint), don’t rely on the brush’s watercolor edge. Seriously, you’ll get the edge every single time you make a brush stroke. INSTEAD go to layer settings -> border -> watercolor border so you can make a block of watercolor color and then adjust the border from there. You get much more control and can adjust blurriness, opacity, darkness, etc.

Holographic textures. I’m still looking into different ways of doing this, but gradient maps seem to be very popular. For those who dont know, gradient maps take a set greyscale tone and assign it a color (this color’s tone does not need to be equal to the grey tone).

Actually, on the topic of gradient maps. I only learned a few months ago that people color greyscale paintings using gradient maps, and that’s one of the methods used to make it not look god awfully muddy.

So I found this tutorial on Youtube about someone who shades by progressively making the shading change to a contrasting color and I. Am fascinated by that. Will get back to yall when I experiment with that. (For credit’s sake, the tutorial was made by @bluebescuits and can be found here, set to the beginning of that part of the video https://youtu.be/zZEF7SEh2S4?t=428)

COLOR JITTER. there are so many possibilities with this one. One thing I was doing back around artfight was selecting areas of light and using a HEAVILY color jittered brush to color it in. Then, select the shaded areas and do the same. Afterwards, I’d turn off the color jitter and just start rendering using whatever color I wanted. Usually, indigo/blue/purple colors would be used moreso for the darkest spots because they have a darker tone by default, and yellow/pink would be used for the lightest colors.

Because I’ve talked about color tone a few times, I feel like I need to include this Youtube tutorial, “HOW TO HYPERPOP (draw with saturated colors)”: https://youtu.be/NKV2VWWleBk It’s what originally inspired me to make this google doc, and absolutely exploits the tone-color relationship do make some REAL interesting art. I’d tag the creator, but I don’t think they have tumblr, but they’re badjaune on ig/twitter

ill get back to yall when i figure out how to do those parallel scribble/hatching painting look. i will crack the code on that one i want it so badly

First, you’re going to put white underneath all the sketch layers (see “WHITE” layer) and then make all the “between” layers white as well (see all the white-colored layers).

Get your colors together. Above both your sketch and white layers, make a “multiply” layer and start coloring over that bad boy.