Color

[TechnOkami]

So recently I've been working in almost solely graphite and ink, with dabbling in Photoshop as a painting tool.

I'm really bad at color and want to get better at it.

Is there a particular medium of art (pencils, chalk, pastels, oils, acrylic, Photoshop, Sai, etc.) which is good/superior for learning how to use color as an added dimension to artwork?

Logically since I'm using mainly a mechanical pencil, colored pencils would theoretically, in my mind, be a good platform for learning. However, I don't really like how colored pencil art turns out, so unless there is incredibly good reason I should use it, I am disinclined to.

[Thanqol]

I like SAI because it has less fancy stuff than other programs, so it funnels you in to focusing on the basics and necessities. As far as the learning process goes you can get an awfully long way with the standard paint brush.

Colour, as I understand it, is all about the relationship between colours. Orange might look pink if it's next to yellow, and blue might look grey or white alongside red. No colour exists in a vacuum. A paint brush is a great tool because it teaches you how blending works and how colours transition into each other, and digital is great because colour is both expensive and super easy to screw up while you're learning. It's something that requires a lot of play to figure out so have fun with it!

[flyingchicken]

Speaking strictly from a digital-only experience:

Learn the basic language of color (what value, hue, saturation and chroma are), and as for tools, anything that lets you see colors in terms of value, hue, and saturation--value can be tricky, as I understand Photoshop (and older versions of SAI I'm pretty sure) let you have a value/lightness slider based on the strength of the individual R/G/B subpixels instead of an actual value scale that goes from black to white--which shouldn't be a problem if you have a triangular/square color picker anyway.

Once you can frame your understanding in terms of hue, value, and chroma (saturation being largely subsumed into chroma anyway), then you can approach color studies of nature/paintings/whatever in terms you can act on (what hues work together, and in what chromas). The classic way to approach it is to have a good grasp of values first, knowing how to render form and draw attention with dark and light, before adding hues and chroma into it, but this is your hobby and you can do whatever you want.

As for more practical stuff, I find that blending is for people who know what they're doing because otherwise it just leaves a smudgy mess (I'm guilty of blending without knowing what I'm doing).

[TechnOkami]

Sorry for not getting to these in a timely fashion.


It's something that requires a lot of play to figure out so have fun with it!

It's hard to have fun with art when I'm not confident with my skills, and everything I see and make ends up turning out like sh!t. But then again, I can get disheartened easily and don't have the best of confidence with things, although I'm not as bad as I once was.

The classic way to approach it is to have a good grasp of values first, knowing how to render form and draw attention with dark and light, before adding hues and chroma into it, but this is your hobby and you can do whatever you want.

I intend to not have it be just my hobby, although that's a ways away with where my skill currently is. DA/Tumblr/MyGitPArtGallery are kind of poor representations of all my art, because I've been doing a bunch of pencil and ink drawings as of late, but I don't have a scanner and I don't like how they come out through photos.

[banthesun]

Hi Okami!

I'm terrible with digital colouring, but I can give you a bit of advice for traditional media if you want it. The big difference is that in traditional, red + yellow + blue = black (not brown, that's just something they teach you in kindergarten. If you've never done it before, mixing a chromatic black is a good excersise in colour anyway), but in digital red + green + blue = white. Of course, you can also fiddle around with HSV values too, but I'm not great at that either.

Actual, not microsoft, paint would be my first suggestion if you really want to learn about colour mixing, though the costs tend to be high. The real advantage of working with paint is you're constantly mixing your colours, so it's pretty much all colour work. Acrylic paint dries slightly darker than it looks when it's wet, but it's such a small thing compared to the advantages that I wouldn't even bother with oils.

The first rule of painting is you never use colours straight from the tube, you always mix them first. Of course, this means you don't have to buy the bazilion different colours of paint that some places will try and sell you (looking at you, games workshop :smallannoyed: ), just a red, blue, yellow, and white will be fine. You can get a tube of black too, if you like, but at art school the teachers would get mad if you ever used store bought black. Mixing your own does generally look nicer (mixing just burnt umber and a blue works as a compromise, though), but I wouldn't enforce it.

If you want something closer to drawing, pastels, crayons, and chalks all work. Personally I prefer crayons, but that's really just preference. All of them push you away from using the white of your page, which is a good thing when learning colour work. They're a pain to mix though, since they all get so dirty.

If you have your own personal gold mine, you could try copics too. I've never been able to afford them, but I know plenty of people who swear by them.

Anyway, that's my advice. I'm far from proffesional, but hopefully there's some stuff there that's helpful to you. :smallsmile:

[shawnhcorey]

Have you checked out MyPaint (http://mypaint.intilinux.com/)? It emulates the traditional tools, charcoal, oil, watercolour, etc. And it's free. :smallsmile:

[TechnOkami]

I... have really bad experiences with painting, but namely due to the fact that I was taking a higher skill level painting class than I could handle... and I somehow acquired inner and outer ear infections in both ears... yeah not so great times. Long story short I'm a tad biased about painting, and I'm not sure if I'll ever feel comfy around it again. However, soft pastels currently interest me, as it's closer to pencil work (or in this case, charcoal). But thank you for the advice nonetheless.


Have you checked out MyPaint (http://mypaint.intilinux.com/)? It emulates the traditional tools, charcoal, oil, watercolour, etc. And it's free. :smallsmile:

Something I've come to learn doing art is that while some tools might be superior for X, Y, or Z reason, ultimately it's the skill of the artist that enables them to use whatever tool they use effectively to produce good works of art. So for now, I'm going to be pretty much sticking with Photoshop and eventually getting Sai.

[Thanqol]

It's hard to have fun with art when I'm not confident with my skills, and everything I see and make ends up turning out like sh!t. But then again, I can get disheartened easily and don't have the best of confidence with things, although I'm not as bad as I once was.

Just remember that you've got 10,000 bad drawings to get out of your system before you start making good ones! So don't try to produce finished products, you don't have the skills for it yet - try to produce learning experiences. Say you've made a picture that you think is okay. Now grab a brush and paint all over it. Ruin it! Destroy the thing that you have created! See what the process teaches you!

Break the psychological connection between you and your output. The goal is to make you a better artist, not to produce pieces of art! Quality will come at it's own pace!

[Kasanip]

I like [charcoal] and [pastel] and [watercolor] very much.

Probably the advice in this thread is more helpful than me. :smallredface:
However, please enjoy painting! :smallsmile: