[vancekovacs]

Okay, this will be an atempt to add some enlightenment on using color in making a picture. There are already quite a few good tutorials on color so I'll just add in my 2 cents. And since I have a mild case of heartburn tonight I'll stay up and write...

First off, for me personally color is one of the most exciting parts of picture making when it goes right. However, it wasn't always the case for me. When first starting out my color flat out stunk. I had a basic understaning of Color Theory; compliments, saturation, hues...but i had no clue where to begin or how to apply the theories. In thinking I was appling them, it would turn out a disaster. And since we are on the subject, there are only color "theories" because getting your color to behave is more like social science and chemistry then appling perspective or value or rendering.

I'll try not to get too philosophical with it but it is amazing how many parallels you can draw between color relationships and personal relationships. The subject of color is much larger then one message could ever convey.

This little tutorial will be on "inventing" your color not color for a landscapes or color for a portrait, that is a different disipline. I'll also will stay away from the certain "laws" that govern color; like an object further away will take on more properties of the atmosphere, like blue mountains in the distance, or an object will take on the properties of the light shining on it; sunlight or fluorescent light...We'll stick to the intuitive side of things not so much the technical though those are eaqually important..

Though there is much greater art out there,I'll make comments on my Silver Marches Piece For all intents and purposes a pretty "desaturated" and monochromatic piece if you were to take your color picker across it. However, it doesn't look like that to the eye. As you look at the piece your eye will pick out greens and blues that aren't really there, especially as your eye focuses on a particular area


Some Fundimental Guides:
Color's Emotion
Ask your self, "What do I want to achieve with my color?" What is the scene about? What pallette will best serve the emotion of my picture? this will be tricky if you're not used to this. Color does evoke emotion. If you don't believe me paint the inside of your house fire-engine red and see how it effects your emotions for the next month. The best thing to probably do as a beginner is look at good color. Get influenced by good art. Sargent, Wyeth, Cornwell, Bisley, ...there's quite a few out there. Also look at films with heavy art direction; Crouching Tiger, Minority Report, Tim Burton Movies...

Also, it is always easier on the eyes when your color has harmony in your picture, though this is not a rule, sometimes you may want to create discord. It's up to you. There are powerful pieces of art that do this, For me personally, i usually go for harmony. Though a divorce may be exciting in some sort of way, I perfer a great marriage.

Compliments
The best way to find a perfect compliment for your color is to blop a bit of flat grey right next to the color, then try to eyeball that color in you color wheel. Let the color itself dictate what compliment to pick instead of you trying to make a guess at it. The greatest thing I learned is that you can have a comlimentry color scheme without using any "true" compliments at all. READ "Magical Gray Down Below.

Warm & Cool
A basic and yet powerful divsion of color. Start with broad divisions [The main character will be cool against a warm back ground]and work into finer divisions: { The Main character's upper body will be cooler to his lower body], and finer still [The light will be warm on his cooler skin] and still finer: [the peek of the highlight will be cool on the warm light]. This is a very basic approch almost formulaic, it can definetly get as comlicated as you want...but start simple. The greatest thing about thinking in these terms is that it's reletive to the paticular spot on your piece, which means you can keep refining these divisions without harming the broader divisions you made previous.

Notice the sky, basically cool to warm, left to right. and basically warm to cool from background to foreground.


Saturated & Desaturated
REMEMBER: A Heavily Saturated Color is like a blustery drunk pirate that wants to tell stories, it's best to surround this fellow with an audience that will compliment his brashness namley quiet and subservient, unless you want a clash. Otherwise, let the saturated areas dominate. Surround them with desaturated areas to give them punch. And use saturation sparingly. It will give you a broader pallette. REMEMBER: The more grays I use the more the smallest amount of satuated color will look vibrant. It's all reletive and it has everything to do with context.

Notice the bits of red. I think the brightest red in the picture is in that dwarfs hair. but if you color pick it it's not "really" that red at all. Notice the patch of bluish-green on the lower-left orc's cheek..guess again. It's not green at all. It just looks that way because of the context.


Magical Gray
Okay, if you don't read anything at all read this:
I wish I had the quote..but it goes something like this: Dean Cornwell said, using grays and browns are like a chef who skillfully uses sauces and gravys. They are there to compliment the flavor of the meat. I found this out by doing 100s color maps for texures I built for work. It was like doing little color abstract paintings. In it I learned the secret of good color...GRAY. Blop down a saturated color and slowly start desaturating and darkening/lightening your color as you blop around You'll see magic appear. You''ll start seeing compliments and all sorts of happy accidents. I truely plan for these accidents to happen. I do not pick evey color in my pieces, they sort of pick themselves.
Do this Test: Paint a saturated ORANGE. Now put a 100,100,100 Gray dot in the middle. The dot will look cool against all that Orange. Do the Same with BLUE. And add teh same 100,100,100 Gray Dot. If yu compare the two, they look like different colors to the eye...Magic. Magic I say. This is why you cannot trust your own eye to pick a color, it HAS to mingle with the other colors. Let all you color mixing happen on the canvas.



Counterchange
Or Transposing, this is an interesting subject. In any piece I'm doing I want as much counterchange as I can shake a stick at. But here's the basic idea as it relates to color. Let you temperatures shift as much as you can make them. A plane of light, form turning in space, forground to background, muscle group to muscle group Warm, Cool, Warm, Cool, Warm, Cool.

Look at the gray sidwalk on a sunny day and take notice to all the temperature changes, they are almost infinate. Yet the sidewalk itself might be cooler against the warmer street, but the street might apear to be cooler against the warmer air...and so on and so on...Look at a plane white wall. Can you see all the warms and cools? Your view of the world around you will begin to change once you start seeing this. The Magic of Color is all around you.

Some Parting Tips:
1. Paint pictures in warm and cool grays.
Slowly introduce saturation. You'll be amazed at the milage you'll get out of your color. Start with one hue and only desaturate and saturate that hue. You'll be amazed at how little you have to shift the hue to get all sorts of colors.

2. Do quicky Color Abstracts.
Paint the color of a rock or the ground.

Please give me some feeback on this and I can add to it in time. For now I'm tired and it's late and my mind is getting fuzzy. Sorry for anything that's unclear. I hope that some of this is helpful

Vance
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[bjotto]

since anyone hasn't said anything, I'l just say GREAT WORk and THANKS
you said a couple of things I've never heard before

[Matthew]

yes color theory is certainly magic and the funniest thing to experiment with. I am in the beginning of the color theory understanding and I found some really good stuff in this.
I have been going through this warm & cool stuff before but your tutorial really made it click in my head, wow.
I guess it all depends on where the sun comes from then, so if the sun were behind the viewer in your piece above I guess it would be warm colors in the foreground and cool colors in the background, am I right?

Gool stuff indeed and thank you for this tutorial, nice picture btw.
Matthew

[Mikko K]

Thanks a lot Vance!

I really like your paintings. I've been struggling with color lately so this was very useful tut for me. Thanx again!

[SolarC]

Very inspiring tutorial and pictures! Thanks very much.

[Prometheus-ANJ]

Putting grey next to a color to see the compliment color is a good trick. I haven't thought of finding complimentary colors that way.
I mostly just add some random hues by using a brush on transparency/opacity or modifying the RGB sliders. Well, not really random. Planes pointing up gets a little sky-blue, down a little earth color, shoulders and knees get darker, breast gets a cool white etc etc.

'HERO' is another example of a colorthemed movie.
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[vancekovacs]

Matthew- Real Lighting Schemes will always give you the correct direction and you almost can't go wrong colorwise by learning what Prometheus-ANJ is doing in his thread. In fact that stuff is invaluable to learn. However, whether the sun is above, setting, rising or there are 2 suns and one is green, you still need to think of your color on an abstract level. Your color can still work whether it's "correct" in the real world or not. Best thing to do is work up your own sort of formula and continue to experiment. I always get tired of my same old color schemes. That's where ol' Photoshop is a blessing. If my color is working but not exciting I can run it through hue& saturation and every combination works because the color was already working . From there I'll run it through almost every color adjusment tool that photoshop has so I get a scheme that looks fresh to me. then I can use that as my base to paint.

Maybe that's a good tip to ad:
Come up with a working color scheme
and experiment from there to see other color harmonies.
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[jfrancis]

http://www.digitalartform.com/colorJudgement.htm

[Lunatique]

Color is never defined by each on its own--the only thing that matters is their relationship to each other when thrown into the same enviroment. I learned quite a bit from working on this piece(it's not finished yet--I still have to tweak much of it). I purposely had a strong mixture of warm and cools, and if you just color-picked around in the cool areas--much of it is just slight variations of greys. There are other little surprises in there when I color-pick around. Colors you think you're seeing are actually not what you think at all--it's the surrounding colors that makes your eyes/brain shift it's orientation.

[Torstein Nordstrand]

[vancekovacs]

jfrancis- thanks for the definition. "Albers Effect" I still have difficulty seeing what a color really is when it's mingling down with other colors, however, at that point, it matters more to me that it's working than what the RGB value is. You make some good points on your page.

Lunatique- Agreed. I think once you start dividing color into warm and cool you've got onto the good road to succesful color

Torstein Nordstrand- I doubt lightyears. It was around 7 years ago that I began experimenting and probably 5 years ago before I starting getting any sort of results I liked. In any respects it did take time to develop, I definetly wasn't born with it.

Prometheus-ANJ: You've got a great color sence I've always enjoyed you little robots. Your Color thread is good stuff.
HERO, I've never heard of it and will have to check it out. Maybe it would make for a good thread starter:

COLOR Themed Movies

The Legend of Suriyothai was a movie I saw recently and from the opening credits I was captivated. Great art direction. I highly recommend it. Of course whether or not you liked them the Matrix movies do look great.
The first Stuart Little
The Royal Tenenbaums
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[Malachi Maloney]

Torstein Nordstrand~ You're always worried too much about whether something's "cheating" or not. If you're gonna be such a stickler for "rules" when you paint, you should stick to traditional forms of media like oils. Because digital painting often involves a lot of improvisation with things like sliders and levels pallets to really push things to their fullest. You're a good artist man, just paint/draw/slide and don't worry so much about these "rules" you've built up in your mind.


vancekovacs~ Good stuff. I've slowly but surly started coming to the same conclusion about using saturated colors against desaturated ones to complement each other. Admittedly, my knowledge isn't as extensive as yours is yet. So things like this tut are helpful in expanding said knowledge. Much appreciated sir!


Take em easy,
Malachi
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[Linus]

yeah hero is the most color themed movie ever i think.. it's eye blasting color action when they are fighting under those falling leaves.. crazy.

heard that they collected real leaves for the movie.. dunno if it's true.. but it's really impressing work even if not!

and vance: good tutorial.. i think lots of "painters" do know too less about colors.. perhaps i'm wrong but i don't see much art out there "living from colors (mainly)"

[Malachi Maloney]

Forgot to add that "What Dreams May Come" is a fantastic color themed movie. Check it out if you haven't already.

Great music too...

~M~
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[horstenpeter]

Wow, great stuff. this was very helpful. Would you mind if I tried to teach some of this to some fellow students (see my other thread) ?
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[kaz7777]

Thanks vancekovacs!! This was very helpful. A great strategy, and simplified thought process.

[dorian]

heya, thank you vance and everybody who contributed!
the images won't show, though

did anyone save the files and can email them to me? or can you, vance, fix the links? or are they just temporarily not working?

[Tzan]

These posts are dated 2004. So I doubt you'll get to see those images.

[jfrancis]

That's unfortunate. I remember those images - they and the associated text were great information.

[Petri.J]

Does anyone have those images? Seems like the links are broken.

Edit: Oh, it was already answered