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With that out of the way let’s take those lines and add some color to them!

This time I’ll show you some quick n dirty ways to take your color up a notch 😃 

#1 Use Color “Families”

Sometimes when you want to color you might have one or two main colors in mind (but then the rest you just pick randomly).

Or heaven forbid you pick all your color randomly - it’s ok if you do. I used to too >.>

But color shouldn't be random. Colors are clique-y. They only like to hang out with other colors.

If you are new to this just start with a complementary pairs for your main colors:

• Blue + orange

• Purple + yellow

• Red + green

Let’s use red and green as our main colors. We will use some color families to pick our other colors. (There are endless online color calculators to play with this online.)

#2 Don’t Oversaturate

Saturation is how "vibrant" a color is. You don’t want all your colors to be highly saturated or your art will burn out someone’s eyeballs. We don’t want that, k?

You can think of saturation as how L O U D a color is.

When a band plays not every instrument should play at full volume. The instrument doing the solo should be the loudest and the rest of the instruments are just there to help.

You don't do drum and guitar solos at the same time, right? It’s the same with your colors.

Pick one saturated tone to be the dominant color. Let the rest of the colors accent your main color.

1. I’m deciding the “major” color is the shirt. So RED is now my dominant color. Red is playing the “solo” in this piece.

2. Our red is around 75% saturation. That’s good for a dominant color (usually 75-100% is good). But our green is about 50%. That’s too high for my taste.

3. I’ll lower the saturation of the cool colors - the green hair and the blue in the eyes. This leaves our warm colors (the red shirt and orange pupils) to POP!

4. I changed the green of the hair and the blue of the eyes (our cool tones) to around a 25% saturation. This is generally a good range for colors that accent our dominant colors.

#3 Add Gradients to Areas

Here’s a digital special!

(You can do this in traditional too. You just have to plan ahead before as you apply color)

1. Start by picking some big areas. I’m choosing her:

   • hair

   • skin

   • shirt

   • stockings

2. Select each area using a wand tool.

3. Use a gradient tool with the colors Black and White set to around 10-30% (play with the %) set to soft light. Now apply the gradient along the length of the selected area.

4. Select the rest of your main color areas and do the same 😁 

At this point if you don’t like using light and shade you could stop. But that’s just silly. Next time I’ll show you some quick lighting tricks - probably Friday 👉️👉️ 

As always, remember to have fun with your art.

Peace,

Brosatsu

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