ART – Taking Risks and Experimenting With Color

You simply can’t get good at color without experimenting and doing some crazy things you don’t feel comfortable doing.

Case in point…

I still don’t feel comfortable with color.  It seems to me like my last coloring job turned out okay by accident.

It felt as if I was stumbling into all kinds of happy accidents all the way through. That said, I learned a few things I wanted to do different this time.

To this end, in my next coloring job, I’m experimenting.  On of the things I thought wasn’t quite working in the last process was how dark the shadows where. Especially since I wanted the drawing to be lit by daylight.

If you see the final colors, they don’t seem that dark, but as I was coloring them, they were much darker and I had to lighten them up.

The process this time will be different.  I will start with a slighter lighter base than I did previously. That way I can both darken and lighten it where I think it needs it.

Which is the way most artists paint anyway.

Also any ambient light or reflective light will be put in a little later.

And the last thing that I’ll be doing different is the color choices.  I’m doing a Tetrad color Scheme approach.

In order to pick the colors I wanted to use, I went to the website Color Scheme Designer.  I believe it’s a website for web design colors but I think it will work fine for my purposes.

You can see the color scheme it came up with at the top of this post.

So I started using the colors.  This is all I got done this week:

I’ve barely started.  The idea behind coloring every character one color, was just to see what the most dominant colors of each character would look like over all. I also wanted to see what the dominant color (blue) looked like next to the secondary ones.

To be honest, I don’t really think it’s helping. Still, I’ll move forward and hope to get more done (if not all of it done) by next week.

I’m uncomfortable again.  This feels risky to me.  I don’t really know what I’m doing, but I know can’t learn if I don’t risk and experiment.

Hopefully, it will turn out okay.  The one good thing about coloring this drawing is the minimal amount of skin I have to color.