Why Color Matters (Color Theory)

[skicoak]

But now in the digital age, especially when screens have gotten much better at displaying colors in high resolution, the uber brights are preferred in smaller portions. Could be one reason for the shift.

Luminosity is definitely a new factor to consider.

[WhiskeyMadDog]

This video explains everything. Seriously! Give it a watch. It will change your life and your art. :3

[rajillustration]

I'm a huge fan of talking about color theory. I highly, highly, highly recommend James Gurney's book "Color and Light" https://jamesgurney.com/site/213/color-and-light-a-guide-for-the-realist-painter (he has digital downloads right now because of coronavirus, in case you want to purchase it. I've bought a lot of art books, but this is my favorite one about color and how and when to use it)

I think that a lot of color theory is learning your own personal aesthetic--which is great--but again means that any and all advice is just...advice. In color theory especially, rules are made to be broken, so I can't say there are any things that should "never" be done.

But, here's my advice with a grain of salt. And it's to plan a palate

1.) Gamut Masking: It's easier to do realistic paintings if you have a color palate already decided with as few colors as possible (using a range in between them to give the impression that you used a ton of color.)

James Gurney describes that range like this

It's called "Gamut Masking" and is hardly the only way to color a piece, but gives you pretty great results every time. The points labeled "P" are your 3 main colors, and that triangle is the range of colors in between you can safely use and make it look really cohesive. You can do the same thing by using 4 points and making a square, or you can use 2 point and make a line. It works every time.

And here's an example of where I've used it for a twitter thing a while back. Forgive the yugioh fanart. You guys always get my Yugioh fanart and I swear I draw other things (I don't) I put him in shadows on purpose but this also works for paintings in full light.

So my four points are on the left of Marik here--that very saturated yellow, blue, and then muted green and brown (it's faint but you can see the diamond I drew above it.) I ramp up and down on those colors by adding white or adding black. This gives me a good range of colors to safely use and I can access them with my color picker as I paint digitally. (this is a traditional technique as well, to make a color palate with only these ramped colors to mix with)

What's crazy about Gamut Masking is just how it Always Works. It works So Well. Like this was a piece in difficult muted lighting with grey skin tones and...it still worked. It is nuts how well Gamut Masking works, and everyone should try it out at least once.

2.) The second best advice I was ever given about color theory is that it's important to rely on the fact that colors appear to change depending on what's around them. This is where stylizing our color palates can really help us solve problems when it comes to art and help us cheat. Our eyes will see red as redder if it's next to something with green in it. Gray will look like a skin color when placed next to the right color. A lot of color theory is learning that color is only what it is next to, and that color is a figment of our weird ass broken brain, and must always been seen in context of what it's around.

So, when I plan colors for a piece I always start with choosing the color palate. Usually I'll only choose 2-3 colors for standalone illustrations. So in this one I only use blue and red because it was simple and didn't need anything more than that (versus the Marik illustration which needed a whole 4 point masked range).

The color serves the composition, so it does not need to be realistic. The background recedes because the red pulls us forward (red tends to come forward in illustration, cool colors like blue tend to recede) Our brain does the rest.

but for a comic that has a lot of complex objects, I'll make a bigger palate. So here's what my palate looks like for a comic I'm currently making for the webtoon contest. It has over 150 panels, so to keep it consistent, I'm going to use this palate, which is a lot bigger.

(And for this palate I didn't use Gamut Masking, actually--instead I just went with what I thought was cool at the time.) Having a palate is way quicker than reinventing color each time you go to fill. Just use your palate and every time you're good.

If I need to push things to the background I can use a screen layer with the light blue, if I need to bump things to the foreground I can use warm colors. The red is only for symbolic accents. And, overall--it's a comic, which is stylistic by nature, so I don't need to worry about realism, I can use color to instead solve my problems.

So a problem I'm dealing with right now is that I have this really overwhelming complicated building in the background a lot. To fix that issue, I decided to make it mostly pink. Is that realistic? Nah. In reality that building would have tons of different colors on it that would clash with everything else around it, taking away interest from my main character. So I make it pink so it flows into one mass into the background. And of course there's the added plus that I think the pink looks cool against that blue. Here's an example.

While ordinarily I'd want to put in way more detail than this--it's a comic, and I have to make like 100+ more illustrations, and so I just don't have the time. Color theory saves me by allowing me to just color block and use gradients for atmosphere. Done and done.

I could go forever on this subject, but I can tell this post is long, so for more good examples of stylistic colors in comics I hiiiighly recommend Mobius. He knew what he was doing and used just WILD colors. So good.

[Seaby]

I agree that values are easier to work with - I'm far more used to the black and white of cross hatching sketches (no idea if there's an actual term for it, despite searching for one) and manga (of which I consume far more than colored comics).
But add in colors, and my eyes can't catch the different values and the overall image looks too flat.

[Seaby]

I want to ask about how you choose your colors before you start coloring. Does it depend on the subject matter, or the emotion you're trying to invoke?

As for suggesting colors - how do you choose the right color that feels natural? In the past if I wanted to darken a scene I would just add a darker overlay - though I admit it made the image look washed out.

[Kiweevil]

Pink and green pallets are my favorite to work with. That's why I made a lot of forests I'm my comic pink and the sky often has a green-ish hue. Here's a piece I'm still working on

I agree with you on the saturation thing. Especially with color schemes like that one. Brights make it seem very kandi kid, dulls make it seem more serious and almost sci-fi imo. Saturation can make or break a comic panel. Things can look wildly cartoonish or out of place with an inharmonious amount of vividness.

But as far as colors go, I also like flipping the moods in color theory on their head. I love using typically soft and happy colors in gorey or horrifying ways. So much fun.

[Seaby]

@rajillustration I must admit that I have only recently begun using pallets (like, twice so far - I'm really new to playing around with color) and I have found that they are incredibly helpful. I've been using palletgenerator where I upload an image and it generates a pallet from it. However, there aren't always images that produce colors that I'm looking for for certain pieces.
I think that your advice on the way colors appear beside one another has made sense to my experiences in the past. If I see a color I like and attempt to include it in a work it never looks the same, and I'm assuming that it has something to do with the colors i place beside it. I'll keep your advice in mind and try to experiment more with what suits the image as well as my tastes.

@joannekwan I think that after looking over your examples of saturation that I've been misunderstanding the general shading of forms and that not everything has to be uniform. For the most part, I usually desaturate both the subject matter and the background (as you've displayed in the upper right example) and seeing the differences in each one has shown me why, despite using complimentary colors, my works stand out less once color has been added.

[joannekwan]

It's about 50/50 for me when choosing colors. Sometimes I'll pick them right off the color wheel, then other times I find I have to tweak the hue/saturation either for a certain color(s) or tweak the entire piece. But usually I start by picking either a mood, time of day, or a particular palette I think is interesting.

And it takes time to get the feel of picking 'natural' looking colors. I say the best way is to study illustrations and photographs you like. Overlays are calculated numerically, and while they can get the job done a lot of the time, they can't exactly approximate how light works in the real world. The best tool you have are your eyes!

It's a lot of practice, but I say it's worth it!

[Shanny8]

I do know the very basic idea of the color wheel and complementary colors. Beyond that - nada

Same. I know all the general rules & principles, but when I try to apply it- massive FAIL. Right now I'm gettin by on VERY limited knowledge; it frustrates me at times coz I want to expand my skills and knowledge.

@phantasos I've given up on watching any type of YT video in regards to color/theory; most of the time they are yammering on and on about stuff and after a while I start to tune it out. The other part of the time, they skip all over stuff and I feel like I just watched an R- rated movie on regular TV where they cut out the nudity & adult language. I have yet to find any information that "sticks" in my memory.

If you're using a palette

That's my other issue- since my skill level & knowledge of color/theory is minimal, creating palettes is a "no can do" process for me. Right now my process is kin to one hand covering my eyes and pointing at colors- I currently pick stuff coz I visualize that it looks acceptable; I rather pick colors with a better understanding of how to manipulate them for max visual effect.

[Luminosophy]

I want to heavily second studying illustrations and photographs, it's like 95% of how I learned the subject. If I was painting a beach, I'd have 3-5 photo references and would find some fine arts painters to get their sort of pushed/ abstracted versions of the same thing. Don't be afraid to colour pick to see how A: other artists put it all together and B: how it works in the real word. Do it enough with some photographs and you'll quickly pick up some relationships! It's all about back engineering.

I would give a hint too, start by colour picking the darkest area in any given photo. The hues and values will surprise you.

[SeraphicMayin]

Edit: tl;Dr ; I just want to say, I LOVE color theory. Colors are vital to my work and so getting an understanding of them was also vital to me. I have the basics of it here along with my thoughts. I hope it helps.

There's a wide array of things under the umbrella of color theory discussed here and I'm not sure I followed all of it.

But my personal understanding is that there's a misunderstanding that Color Theory is some kind of rule set.

It's just a set of guidelines about the relationships colors have to one another. The color relationships and methods of Application are two distinct things.

The former are the "rules": yellow and purple are complementary, additively red and blue make purple, etc.

The latter are subjective to how you set up color to define mood in your given story/illustration. No color palette has a definitive meaning to it BUT there are,in society, general concensus about certain things: Very bright saturated colors hurt the eyes, muddy desaturated colors can make an image unclear, yellow is happy, blue is sad.

You see how my list gets more subjective.

If in my story I made it so the background or clothing or the protagonist is blue when they are happy then within the context of my story, blue and perhaps cool colors get associated with that subconsiously. And if I put him in more yellow/orange (complementary and near complementary colors to blue) then I can make those colors "feel" sadder or more negative *In the context of my story".

That's one way to apply color theory.

I feel people mistake how others apply color theory as color theory itself when that's not the case.

Color theory, at the basics, is the 12 part color wheel and the relationships colors have that help you build color pallettes based on your goal for the art.

Basics:
Primary colors: Red, Yellow, Blue
Secondary colors: mixes of Primaries: orange, Green, Purple
Tertiary colors: Mixes of Primary and secondary colors: Yellow-green, Blue-green and so on.

Vocabulary basics:
Hue: a distinct color - pure hue is the fully saturated color
value: the lightness or darkness of the hue
Tint: hue with different amounts of white added, increasing lightness. -- High Value
Shade: Hue with different amounts of black added to it, increasing darkness.-- Low Value
Saturation/intensity: The brightness (not lightness) of a given hue.

So it's a combination of Hue, Value, and Intensity that gives us our full array of colors.

Basic color relationships:
Monochromatic:Single color (in application you would use tints and shades of the same hue at different saturation levels to create contrast for an image)
Complementary: Hues directly opposite of each other on the color wheel: Highest possible contrast at full saturation. Popular for color schemes because of this. Our eyes like contrast.
Analogous; Hues directly next to one another on the color wheel. Eg. Red-orange-yellow are analogous and create "warm" compositions due to how our eyes read the color vibration and associate it, I assume, with sunlight to create the "warm" concept associated with it--generally.
Split complementary: Color scheme made from one set of analogous hues and the central hue's complementary color -- My personal favorite method as it combines Complementary and Analogous relationships.
Triad: Any set of three colors at the ends of an equilateral triangle on the color wheel or 120 degrees apart. Eg. the three primary colors (which is why this combo is used a lot for protagonists, it's the boldest and basic set)
Quad: any set of four hours that are 90 degrees apart.

Come to think of it a lot of geometric shapes can be used to inspire color palettes this way, I'm gonna have to try Pentagons haha ^^

Please remember: Color theory doesn't dictate this is the only way you can use colors, it simply gives you their relationships. How it's applied is as varied as the artists themselves and how you perceive color and the meanings you associate with them.

--
Final point on OP's wanting to know about BG color and focal points.
This relies on Composition of the shot first. Then color scheme. Composition is the sister topic to Color and is a whole other thing xD but I hope primer I provided above is helpful. It only discusses the relationship among hues BUT you can use that as a jumping off point.

For example you now know complementary has high contrast from the get go. So now it's a matter of choosing the right combination of tints and hues of the complementary colors so that the focal pops out in contrast to the BG and that has to do with the Value of the Hue.

And in the end it take practice and experimentation with finished works. Dark characters on a light background, visa versa. If you do want a muddled mood, bring the values closer together and see how much you can push it. It's this sort of experimentation that is "breaking" the rules. But really the "rules" being broken are the conventions society agrees on at a given time.

It's not possible to make a blue-yellow composition and call it complementary even if it's high contrast and a combo that works because the two hues are on a triad. But that's just classification, not rules of use.

If you understand color theory AND societal agreements of color perception, you can use color with mastery.

[surenlicious]

My exploration with colour has gone from wanting to follow the colour wheel exactly to trying out and see what can suit me with experimental palettes. I often like applying those palettes subtly over various aspects in my drawings, but I'm still looking into this more.

[sekabead]

FINALLY A THREAD ON COLOR THEORY! Well, I have to ask something that's been making my head ache for years: for comic making, it's important to ensure every panels have "consistency" regardless of global lightting , e.g if in panel 1 a character is wearing blue hat, then every succeeding panels showing character A must have that character appear to wear a hat of the same tone of blue. But those panels don't need to have the same lighting, so of course that tone of blue actually shifts, but still perceived as the same tone of blue as in panel 1. Then how do you, most efficiently and effectively, picking such colors so that they perceived consistent across the panels, and across episodes, especially if the panels have different lighting conditions? This is still a big problem for me

For now I've been abusing blending mode, especially linear light and overlay. But, because of that my drawings tend to be oversaturated. Whenever I pick manually, it becomes a mess first and then many, many trial and errors, inflating time needed to make a single episode.

[SeraphicMayin]

I'll be honest. I kinda cheat and don't use proper color variations with different lighting scenes.

Instead to save time my Flat colors are the same for every character, as are the shading hues.

Then I use soft air brush for colored lighting on an Add blending layer, then darker shades of the same hue and analogous hues on a Soft Light layer to add saturation and contrast.

The Add blending layer atop lines and color base will help with universal lighting.

And if it's a dark scene I add a Multiply layer and using the same hues as lighting I'll darken the scene. Sometimes I use the complementary hue cause shadows are usually the opposite hue as the lighting.

And you don't have to worry about the outfit color consistency cause you always use the same color for the base!

It's worked for me so far. But I know mine is more subtle and not exactly the way it would be realistically but I'm not really aiming for realism xD more for mood and if it looks aesthetic like movie set lighting.

Examples of the same character in cool, dark, and warm lighting:

[DokiDokiTsuna]

if in panel 1 a character is wearing blue hat, then every succeeding panels showing character A must have that character appear to wear a hat of the same tone of blue. But those panels don't need to have the same lighting, so of course that tone of blue actually shifts, but still perceived as the same tone of blue as in panel 1. Then how do you, most efficiently and effectively, picking such colors so that they perceived consistent across the panels, and across episodes, especially if the panels have different lighting conditions? This is still a big problem for me

To actually answer the question, my "efficient" method is just shifting all the colors by the same amounts, over the same parameters. Like, if the next panel is a night scene, and a color I've figured out has 'Saturation -10, Blue values +14', then I do the same for the colors I haven't figured out yet, to at least get me closer to the right answer. If it's still not quite right, I modify it from there.

Although, what I actually do most of the time is just a sort of intuitive pick. Not every color will change in the same way under different lighting...some may need to get more intense, others may need to get duller; some may even need to become totally different colors...if you've ever done a sunset scene, you know the deal. It can get hellish...
I guess I've learned enough by now to just 'know' what to do most of the time, but in general if your colors have comparatively similar saturations/contrasts under different lighting conditions, your art won't look wrong. Like, have you ever grayscaled an image manually? If you can do that, you'll be alright.

Although, I say this as an anime/cartoon artist...if you're aiming for realism, you'll probably need to be more careful. ^^;

[indagold]

I don't think color theory is super deep and convoluted as everyone says, all it is really is just make sure your work doesn't look like grandma discovered mspaint. Avoid using computer tones and have contrast between colors is probably a go to for having a good looking piece.

What I sometimes do is just color pick a photo, usually thats where you get an idea of how color works. You realize the whites and blacks in it aren't whites and blacks, the reds aren't stark reds.

[rajillustration]

I think most comic artists do a quick method where they apply blending mode layers on a consistent color they use for their characters over the whole comic. This works really well most of the time, like 99% of the time, but I've noticed it really doesn't work as convincingly for extreme light shifts. Especially for night scenes.

Luckily, Photoshop has a cheat built in for photographers that you can use for that. (and I thiiink Clip and the others might have this too?) It's an adjustment layer called "Photo Filter" and you just choose your color of light and bam, it will shift all of your colors for you.

Mind you, this isn't color theory, this is just a Photoshop trick. But, because photographers rely on it to change the color of their light source in their very realistic photos, it's very accurate.

So for example, here's a normal flower, just lifted off of google for this demonstration.

And lets say you want to get SUPER blue lighting, but like the amount of multiply you'd need is bonkers, we can maintain your original contrast and colors, with use of the adjustment layer.

And voila, the computer did it for us.

[AVXP]

Long as we're here, I came across this palette creation tool a while ago.
Looks like it would be a useful tool.

Color Tool - Material Design

It's also on Steam, but I can't link it properly.

[StrangeVision]

Kind of you to say, sir!