#i didn't see a colored ref so apologies if anything is wrong! | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ineed-to-sleep · 3 years

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hello :] i looked around to see if you had a faq or anything like that & didn't see one so i apologize if this has been asked before but! your coloring style is like... actual goals. do you have hidden techniques or tips or anything like that? i'd love to hear how you do stuff!

Hi! Ihaven’t been asked that before, actually. My coloring is like, something I’ve developed pretty recently and tbh I’m still learning a lot about coloring and shading, so I don’t have that much fresh advice :/ Here’s what I can share so far tho:

- I sketch something and clean it up, then I make a gray base of the shapes in the foreground(usually a character). If I have a background, I start by coloring that, and move on to stuff in the foreground later

- When I color a character it really helps me to have a separate layer for things that don’t touch each other, if that makes sense? Like for example, if I have a character’s hair appearing on top of their clothes, I’ll put the hair on a separate layer. If I have something that’s made out of leather and then something that’s fabric, I’ll also put those on separate layers. If I start making too many layers, I separate them by groups, but most of the time it’s not necessary

- Once I separated everything, I check the colors. That’s a tricky part for me bc I usually either get it right from the start or have to spend a really long time figuring it out. If you also have a hard time with the colors, here’s what I check to try to get them right:

-- I put it in grayscale and check the values

-- I mess with the hue/saturation and curves tools on photoshop.

That usually helps me get a pretty good idea of what’s not working, and you can also change the hue and saturation of individual parts of the picture if you separated it in various layers(sometimes the problem is just one part with an oversaturated color)

- But anyway once I’ve figured out the colors I either shade it with blending modes or manually or a combination of both. I usually get a reference for the light if I didn’t already have one

This is what it looks like at this point. The top 3 invisible layers are the ones with blending modes. I usually have one multiply layer

And I try to make the color work with the flat colors, like for example I’ve got a lot of reds and overall warm tones here, so I went with that for the multiply layer- if I had more blues I’d go with something more blue or cyan, etc.

- Then I put lights on, these are both overlay layers, which are also different shades of red. You can use whatever colors fit better with the image, but if you’re going for something that’s a very different tone from the multiply layer, I recommend erasing parts of the multiply layer where the light will go first, then putting the light on top of those erased parts. But that’s just bc I personally think that if you put different tones on top of the multiply layer your colors might get too muddy. But that just depends on what you’re going for

- I also recommend using very saturated colors very sparingly or starting with very tame colors and increasing saturation as you go(same with dark colors, if I make them too dark I can’t see the lines so I usually make them lighter than what they’re supposed to be and go darker after I’ve put lights and/or shaded it)

- I also really recommend goin nuts with blending modes, testing all of them, putting them on top of each other or using just one, see what looks good to you and go with it

I usually get a ref for all this but sometimes I don’t and just guess it, like there’s nothing wrong with guessing it if you couldn’t find a ref but if you do find one the result will usually be better

That’s basically how I do stuff right now, if I shade it further I usually put the shading layers below these layers with blending modes or just don’t use blending modes at all, but most of the time I’ve been doing stuff just like this. I’ve seen a lot of ppl do it like this and I learned a lot just from reading about other ppl’s process as well

Hope that helped!! if I missed something or if there’s anything you’d like me to go into more detail about just hit me with another ask c:

#asks #long post #art stuff

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