Color Scheming: A yellow room (looking for suggestions)

[DokiDokiTsuna]

Last time I asked for help with a color scheme, pretty much everyone in the thread ignored what I wrote up here, but I'm gonna try to explain myself anyway.

So a while ago I was walking around campus and I saw a room in one of the buildings: it looked like a laboratory space, bathed in an eerie yellow light. I thought it was really cool, like a scene from a horror movie. ^^ So now that I have this antagonist who lives in a hospital that's full of spaces like that, I want to try lighting his environment in the same way.

Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of experience with monochromatic artificially-lit spaces...I'm torn between making up a palette based on yellow and giving it to everyone, or just upping the R and G values on the color schemes the characters already have, as shown here:

I don't know if I like this (I'm not even sure if I'm doing it right)...but there are a lot of things I could do; this is a comic where my main focus is on vibrant colors and dramatic lighting, even if it doesn't make realistic sense. I could go full psychedelic and start throwing cyan and magenta up in there; I have too many options. ^^;

All I know is (a) yellow needs to be the main color and (b) this is a 'meeting of the villains' scene, so I guess I'd prefer for the palette to be sort of...creepy looking. Like, if it's bright, it should be the kind of bright that's a little unsettling; a 'sterilized' brightness. If that makes sense.

(P.S. If any of you just saw the words 'antagonist' and 'villains' and are about to suggest I do the opposite of what I'm going for and make the scene dark with purple/red lighting or whatever, just know I'm going to ignore you as thoroughly as you ignored me. Thanks~)

[rajillustration]

I mean you can definitely keep the yellow, and just focus on composing the shots with the villain in an unsettling way. Like if they're dead center, or if it's a zoom on their spooky eyes. Having yellow and making it a really sterile environment can be pretty artsy so I like the idea. Seems kinda medical feeling.

When I look at pictures online of yellow rooms and yellow lighting people've used in film it almost looks like it's a wash of yellow on an photo filter layer (like I don't even think it was this yellow when they filmed it, and that it was a digital after-effect). I also like how a bunch of film-makers use these fluorescent lights to make it feel more unsettling and yellow, too.

Or portioning it off behind glass like this?

[malatrova]

you need to harmonize the colors, yellow migth be the focus but these colors need to resonate whit yellow...look for a color wheel to see what color complement each other, my comic in tapas uses purple as the principal color and the other colors rotate towards him
look

[nostalgicroxas]

I think you could get by with an overlay gradient

Normal

Plain

Multiply

Glow

Done with paint.net's software. So you can color like normal and then tweak the layers as you drop a yellow on - as you can see I'm not using a Red/Yellow/Blue lemon Yellow, but something more like a canary yellow to get the idea going.

Here's a lemony yellow with an "additive" layer style

The key will to be use yellow and orange-yellows, and to make sure you put a color over the characters as well so it looks like they're being lit by the color. Similar to this picture: it's clear they're in a machine with a green/yellow light on them

[DokiDokiTsuna]

Y'know, I completely forgot about using multiple layers...even though I've been a digital artist for a couple years now, the concept doesn't come naturally to me. ^^; I was born and bred on pencil and paper, and that's where my mind tends to stay.

I'm glad you reminded me though, because I've been meaning to start experimenting with those settings, and this is honestly the perfect comic for it. I settled on a yellow-green layer Color Burn'd over the same yellow background, and so far I'm satisfied:

Characters who are mostly cool-colored seem to get a little too green, so I may have to modify this as I see what the others look like. But this is a great starting point. ^^