brockhofer

Rough Design and Color Choices

Added 2024-10-22 13:08:51 +0000 UTC

Here's a breakdown of how I usually add in color to my designs. The process isn't always like this, but generally I'll follow these steps for the color stage - sometimes the linework is complete before there's color and other times I'll have the colors planned out at the sketch stage like this example.

In terms of deciding on colors and how I pair them, a lot of the time I'll look for examples online of designs with interesting color pairings. In this case I was trying to remember the color scheme for the Cacodemon from DOOM. I find having the reds and purples paired with a pop of green really works well, and even though I was going off of memory instead of looking the design up, I felt like I got close enough to the colors I was thinking of to have a workable color palette.

This isn't always the case for my color choice - sometimes the rough colors I choose to use as a base are random and I'll just try working with those if I can't think of any color scheme I want to try. That lends itself to more odd color pairings and can be a great way to experiment with things that might not be so obvious to pair together.

The one thing I'll always do is try to pick a primary color that will be the base, in this case it was the red for the face. From there you can go a number of ways depending on what you want the design to look like - it can be all different tones of red, red and all black, and on and on and on.

At the end of the day, unless you're designing something that needs to be a certain colorway for a client, experiment and try a bunch of stuff. And remember to have fun with it!