My coloring skills suck. How do you color?

[KiabIce]

So I suck at coloring. I want to know what you all did to get the coloring skills you have!

What youtube videos did you watch or courses did you take to increase your skills? What things did you learn that made coloring easier?

Example of my most recent coloring:

[katewindloft]

What program do you use

[euphisa]

Contrast and lighting are important when colouring. Look at your favourite artists' work, study how they colour. Keep practising!!

[Aleksei]

Hi!
I am not the best on the colour department, but with some nice tutorials I am kind of ok (for now). Check the results here...

examples of what I do

If you think that that is kind of nice, it was all thanks to this tutorials. They focus only on colour so it doesn't matter what program you use. There is more than one way to color, so if you don't feel confortable with this, just search for more ways. Cheers!

[FafasMcMelt]

To be perfectly frank, I'm not that confident in my coloring either. But I do think sharper contrast does wonders for a piece.

[DokiDokiTsuna]

I want to know what you all did to get the coloring skills you have!

I spent lots of time copying other artists. I remember a few years ago I did a 'lessons in lighting' series where I would make my own pieces based on those of others that had interesting coloring and rendering choices.
To be honest, the pieces I made kinda sucked. ^^; But what matters most is to make the attempt, and try to teach your brain a new way of thinking about color. As time went on, I would keep trying to use the skills I remembered from those lessons, and eventually they sunk in on their own.

I think what your piece is lacking in the color department is just 'direction'. Do you want the scene to look gentle, soothing; dynamic, dramatic?
Right now I'm not getting anything from the colors; they're kinda just there. There's some shading, but it's so minimal and subtle that you can barely even see it. Same for the lighting...

Like, you could get rid of any shading and let negative space or the lineart carry the weight, but you didn't do that. You could do the normal thing and use it heavily to establish a direction of light, but you didn't do that either. It's like you just put a little in there as a formality...and as a result all you have is a lot of pale, flat colors that don't say anything.

Even though I have my own comic I should be coloring right now, I thought it might be best if I showed you how I'd improve it, rather than just talking:

It's rough (please don't zoom in) and just a little more obnoxious than what I would do in a serious piece, but that's more or less how I might go about shading and coloring that scene.

If you like it, I'll walk you through my thought process. If you don't...I'm sorry for disturbing you; have a nice day~ OwO;

[sorible]

Coloring just comes from practicing a lot, and some experimenting with lineart. You might want to focus on shading since your drawing looks a little flat. For something like your style, I think just simple cel shading would work better than having it blended or smooth for highlight/shadow.

Look at references, and see where the highlights and shadows are. a lot of improvement will come from practicing by observation and some common sense. In your drawing, it's night time but there's a lot of light coming from the windows, so there would be shadows on the back of the girl's dress and hair since she is facing generally towards the light. There would be some shadow in between the folds of the dress, the guy would have more shadow on the front of his shirt and some highlight around the edge like you did with his hair.

There just isn't anything special I did to improve coloring besides practice. I'm way too impatient to watch any YouTube videos I probably spend about roughly 4-9 hours drawing everyday (whether its for my comic or for anything else), and I just kind of picked up new techniques and tools along the way. I'm not telling you to follow what I do, but I just personally saw improvement a lot faster than if I just watched tutorials.

[KiabIce]

I use Clip Studio Pro

[KiabIce]

Please, share your thought process! I'd love to pick anyone's brains that got decent coloring skills! DM me or reply back to this thread to help others struggling with color as well.

Thanks for your insight!

[monotone_ink]

Copy and study the masters.
This playlist covers some good fundamentals too!

[GumshoeComix]

well right now your drawing is just flats so I wouldn't really say it sucks you still have to add shading and lighting to it which is a good place to practice
I'd also say to practice values or/and making B&W paintings it really helps with shading and lighting.

I actually learned most of my coloring just from looking at other comics or watching speedpaints and making a LOT of practice art where I just mess with the filters until it looks right. Abuse the contrast & color filters cause almost half the time the initial color palette isn't going to be right.
Spend some time looking at photos or paintings that are at different times of the day, your picture looks like its supposed to be at night from the stars in the background but the buildings are lit up like they're in the day. so the buildings should be darker, maybe with a tinge of blue or orange. and dont worry about unrealistic shading like adding red shadows on skin or blue shadows on red It gives things a well needed pop.

[rajillustration]

I think I brought him up in a different thread of someones? Sorry if it was yours and I'm advertising this guy twice, but I just realized Nikolas Cole has a youtube channel and just uploads his old patreon content. He's um very good at coloring, A+

It's long, but a really good insight into how he paints. He's also using Procreate, but nothing so fancy that Clip Studio wouldn't have it. I like that he dives into aspects of color theory, as well, so on why he's using colors and not just how. Worth a look at his channel.

[KiabIce]

Thanks to you I can kinda see how to color the picture so far!

Thanks for your help. I am going to learn from this and revisit this painting again when my coloring skills get better.

[DokiDokiTsuna]

Please, share your thought process! I'd love to pick anyone's brains that got decent coloring skills!

OK! * cracks knuckles *

Personally, I am more of a 'dynamic, dramatic' colorist, so the first thing I did with the image was to lower the Output levels. I don't know what it's called in other art programs, but if it helps, this is what the window looks like in Paint.NET:

Lowering Output makes dark colors darker and more intense (conversely, lowering Input makes light colors lighter and brighter). It's a great general image editing tool; I use it for all my scans~

Anyway, that set the tone for the rest of the process: I noticed how the golden/yellow tones stood out from the dark sky, so I decided to try to 'warm up' the whole scene.

I started by putting that wacky pink gradient in the sky...in hindsight, it probably should've been a little more subtle. ^^; But the point was to imply that, somewhere far away, there were more warm-colored lights that tinged the atmosphere. Plus, it sets it apart from the rest of the scene, so

After that, I used an orange overlay to tint the scene a tiny bit (I think the Blend Mode might have been Multiply, but I tend to pick them randomly so idk ^^; ).
All the rest of my work on the background was just using the fill tool to change the colors manually: I darkened the balcony elements that were further from the dancers, and I added some blue to the colors of the distant buildings, to both set them apart from the foreground and help unify them with the sky.
Then I added some gradients to help emphasize distance-- distance between the dancers and the edge of the balcony, and distance between the balcony and the other buildings.

Before I talk about the dancers, I'm gonna go ahead and repost the image so no one has to keep scrolling back and forth:

So the dancers...the first thing I noticed was the lady's brilliant red dress. And when I see red, my first instinct is to shade with purple.
Just FYI, blue is generally THE shading color, and a great shorthand for generating shade palettes is to (a) darken the base colors, and then (b) raise the Blue values a little. Or if you're me, raise the Blue values a lot. ^^ So I ended up with this saturated violet.

I applied it in 2 layers; one a little darker/more saturated than the other for the extremes of the shadow. Contouring is really important to make this work on clothes (and if it were my art, I would have tried to do a better job)...you have to use the shading to define the folds of the fabric and describe the material to the viewer. I imagined something kind of satin-y, which is a good fit for my saturated shades. ^^ And that's why I added that little highlight on her hip, although ideally I would have put in another spot or two, just so you wouldn't miss it.

After that I went for the skin: I darkened the base color and got a yellow-ish brown...but skin tones tend to look better if they've got some red in 'em somewhere, so I lowered the Green values to get a warmer temperature of brown and smeared that on, making sure to stick with the direction of light set by the dress.

The rest was just dabbing on a few dark splotches here and there...you'd be surprised how much you can improve a piece with just a couple of saturated dark spots. There's a spot on the back of the lady's head, on her ponytail (adds dimension), a spot on the gentleman's hip (emphasizes closeness of the two bodies) and a big splotch all over his shirt, with just a little contouring on his arm and in his armpit.
To be honest, he could've probably used another, darker layer of shadow on the inside where the lady is close to his chest, but I didn't think of it in time. =3=

Last, but not least, I grounded the dancers in the scene with that big ol' shadow at the bottom-- again, making sure to stick with the direction of light.

If you're wondering how I applied all these colors, it was kind of a frenzy of adding layers and blurring the shadows and playing with the transparencies to optimize them quickly (except for the shadow, which I drew directly onto the pic). ^^; But I decided to spend most of this post talking about the colors, since that is the topic at hand.

Thanks to you I can kinda see how to color the picture so far!

Thanks for your help. I am going to learn from this and revisit this painting again when my coloring skills get better.

That looks a lot more interesting already. ^^ Good luck~

[Jenny-Toons]

Currently, I do a lot of dynamic lighting for my characters. Though that comes with a lot of trial and error, especially when you're trying to compliment lighting with skin tone. I actually had an example lying around on how I do default lighting versus other lighting:

I play a lot with different modes in order to compliment my flats. For lighting, I generally do a multiply layer over the drawing (or maybe even a gradient layer) so that the colors match with the color of the light. Kinda like that scene from 1996 Independence Day:

Everything has a green palette before we get to the light. So I try and imitate that:

Course, I'm still learning as I experiment. Some lighting I still need to improve on, and others I have down pack. It's all about experimenting with the vibes you're looking for and also understanding how lighting and shading affects the tone of your work.

[Kirieslawa]

you need to use shades and light, you just put flat colors and some light, to enchance light you have to put a contrast - shadows.
I recomend to do some study and use references pictures not only with pose but also with shading - it'll help you to learn where the shadows create and where the light is. Use poses where there's shanding simillar as that you whan to achive, tones of it ect. you can also adjust base photo a little bit to make colors you want to achive.
No color palette tutorial will help you when you don't know where put those shadows and colors

[Zin_Trollborn]

I hope you don't mind, I used your drawing because I suck at explaining in details and I think it's more effective to see the thing.
So my 2 cents :

• Shadows : don't be afraid to put more shadow on it, it adds more depth to your drawing. Here on the characters (you can add it too on the background of course), I quickly used a new layer in multiply mode.
  

  

• The clothes : don't hesitate to paint the shadows with a strong paintbrush (here just regular brush)
  

  
  
  And then, the "mixer tool --> scrambler" (dunno what name it is in english) makes nice effect to it. (play with it to know how to adjust it)
  
  
  
  I use the same tools on hairs as well.

• Colors : that's the trick for the atmosphere you want. There's lot of ways to color and how to chose the good ones, but here I'll just go to the simple thing of putting a color layer on it (like instagram filters).
  

  
  
  And also if you want even more depth to it, you can add a thin colored lines on the characters like @Jenny-Toons did. It's a simple trick but the effect is stunning.

I know there's lot of more ways to do things and way better as well, but I hope it will help you! ^^

[KiabIce]

Coloring is so hard! I need to practice it more.

[darthmongoose]

That's a huge improvement on the one in the first post! Keep up the good work!

I recommend reading an excellent book called "Color and Light - A Guide for the Realist Painter" by James Gurney. It's one of the best books on the subject I've ever read.

[GumshoeComix]

Woaa that's a huge improvement! It looks so much better good job