triad vs. many colors

[Lastman]

Hi, I\'ve been lurking awhile and this is my first post. My output is tabletop and I\'m trying hard to improve since I don\'t play any tabletop games.

In the days before the internet when I was happy with my \"tabletop\" quality paintjobs, my color selection consisted of a light, medium, and dark version of the color.

Now that I look at the display figures that approach \"fine art\" I see way more sophisticated use of color, like very subtle purples and blues and greens that are not shadows or highlights but they are there and contribute to the visual appeal.

I notice colors everywhere since I\'ve been obsessing: in clothes and hair, and I freeze-frame DVDs all the time to try and get my mind around what artists do… specifically the background artists in the Japanese \"Ghost in the Shell\" and \"Appleseed\" and most recently in the opening credits of \"Doom\". In \"Doom\" they replace the Earth in the Universal Pictures logo with Mars… but Mars isn\'t just red in the sunny part and dark in the shadows: it\'s grey and brown and probably a little orange and yellow.

What\'s that called so I can see if there\'s a class in it at art school? It\'s beyond what I\'ve read in color theory. Maybe it would be called \"applied color theory\" or \"color design\" or \"using tons of colors that can only be discerned when you are very close.\"

 

[Shawn R. L.]

Welcome aboard. If you are new to the whole painting thing and want to improve your color handeling, the first thing I would recommend is to put any black paints in a bag and bury them for a while. Black get\'s used WAY too much for shading. Try to use color to shade whenever possible. Dark blue, dark brown, purple, dark green and the like will go a long way to \'coloring up\' what you do. Of course there is a place for black but it is a good discipline to learn to do without it for a while. Post some WIP\'s and watch the advice pour in. Good luck.

 

[Modderrhu]

Welcome, Lastman!

Originally posted by Lastman
... in the opening credits of \"Doom\". In \"Doom\" they replace the Earth in the Universal Pictures logo with Mars… but Mars isn\'t just red in the sunny part and dark in the shadows: it\'s grey and brown and probably a little orange and yellow.

This is a very good example. Dealing with each colour you mention:

There are different types of greys. In nature, there\'s almost no such thing as a neutral grey, it\'s always tinted by blue, red, or some other colour. The greys of shadows are not grey, they\'re less saturated versions of the base colour (another aspect of what Shawn was talking about). The greys of distant mountains are blue, and the greys at sunrise and sunset are red. The sea\'s greys are green and blue.

It\'s the same with brown. Browns are always red or yellow. Just very muddy reds and yellows. Sometimes intense, sometimes dull, but they remain red and yellow. Brown is really just a mix of three primaries in varying proportions. In fact, brown is grey, but with more colour in it.

It\'s well-known that to highlight red, you paint with orange, and to highlight orange, you paint with yellow.

Instead of thinking about colours in terms of the three primaries, have a look at the hue/saturation/luminance model. It\'ll give you a different perspective on colour. Hue qualifies the base colour; red, green, purple, etc.. Saturation is an indicator of how much colour there is, for example; brown is just a very unsaturated red, yellow or orange, and grey is even less saturated. Luminance can be a measure of how much light there is, if there is too much light, almost any colour can start to look like white. Whereas colours become invisible in too little light.

Of course, that just skims the surface. If you really want to know about colour theory, and how to apply it, have a look at >>this<< site. See you in a couple of weeks.

 

[Shawn R. L.]

To add to my \'take a holiday from black\' theme. Like Modderrhu said, there are seldom true neutral grey\'s.Get a real dark blue and a real dark brown. Mix about 50/50 of blue and brown and you should come up with a very dark grey, bordering on black. With this way comming up with a dark grey/black it will either lean to the warm or the cool and you can come up with an almost endless variety of greys. I like to use this method. I replace black with this concoction and do the whole piece that way. THEN at the tail end I will go back and use just a bit of true black and then it really has a BLACK effect. There is so much color going on in what was done previously that when true black is finally added it really stands out.

 

[DaN]

I guess one of the easiest ways to figure what colourations might be used when painting is time of day;

That is to say that during daylight hours, as the sun is overhead we get a lot of \"warm\" short wavelength light, and during night time we get longer wavelengths.

Depending on the time of day, your \"sunlit\" figures will be lit with yellows and shaded with oranges/browns or lit with pale blues and shaded with purples.

Of course - if you\'re doing SciFi figures, the light from a different sun, going through a different atmosphere could be very different!

(I mean our sun gave superman his powers! Allegedly.)

Hope this helps.