WIP + Color Study Progress & Notes

Hey Everyone! I hope you are having a great start to your week.

I wanted to update you all on what I am working on! This is a new piece I am extremely proud of, one I have sunk 30 hours into already.

It’s the third of a series of new pieces I am working on as I take a deeper dive into color.

Previously, with my stylized portraits I was simply trying to emulate Samdoesarts & learn how to make color work at all with my art.

Now, I am making it more personal. I am looking for and asking myself how I want to use color in my own work.

This started by first identifying artists who I wanted to study. You may have heard of some of them before:

Huaishen j

Ilya Kuvshinov

Zeenchin

WLOP

Guwiez

Run.jia

yuming_art

DannyLaiLai

Ahmed Aldoori

These artists handle color & value in a way I really enjoy and want to use in my own work.

For me, the easiest way to explain what I have learned so far is to write them down as bullet point notes.

So I will share as much comes to mind here, which will also serve as a good reference for me too look back to myself lol.

• How we perceive a color is very subjective to the colors around it.
• Most of reality is VERY desaturated compared to what you may think.
• Color is more accurately broken down into two parts. Hue (also called Chroma) and Saturation.
  • Hue is just what color something is - basically ROYGBIV.
  • Saturation is how grey or intensely vibrant a color is. (Coral Pink -> Bright Red, cool grey -> Ultramarine Blue)
• Value is the third component that is affected by not just light, but both Hue AND Saturation.
  • Certain hues inherently have certain brightness associated to them.
    • From brightest to darkest, here is what I have found: Yellow - Bright Teal - Bright Lime Green - Orange - Magenta - Red - Purple - Indigo/Violet - Blue
    • (I got those colors from the color wheel, using the highest saturation.
  • The more Saturated a color is, the brighter/Darker it will be
• This is NOT reflected accurately in most digital software.
  • A bright red will be very bright to our eye, but clearly not brighter than white. Procreate however, will say it is the same brightness as pure white.
  • The rules aren’t always the same. Sometimes making a color more grey, makes it brighter. Sometimes vice versa.
    • For example, take lime green and make it desaturated? It simply becomes white.
    • This is why you can’t move in horizontal lines on the color wheel to find the greyscale counterpart. (Same concept as the bright red from before)
• A greyscale image can be perfectly turned into a color image using the color layer.
  • It’s just next to impossible to get it pixel perfect when you are manually panting it.
  • This is why most people struggle to convert greyscale to color
    • They simply haven’t mastered painting in value yet, or they put too many details in the greyscale that are impossible to accurately paint in color above it.
• Certain things in life have values that are constant.
• It is very hard to be able to tell what value something is (see life in black and white) without tons of study and experience painting.
  • For example, even snow is not pure white, let alone anything on even the palest skin tone.
• We can detect very subtle changes in value and color.
  • This is more noticeable in the very dark values.
    • It’s not easy to tell 1% difference in the top 10% of brightness but very easy in the bottom.
  • Using this to your advantage means that muted color palettes can be just as interesting to look at as full color.

That was ALOT. I tried to keep it organized but most of it probably doesn’t make sense if you are reading it for the first time without seeing something visually to explain it...so don’t stress lol.

Many of those facts came from a book called Color & Light by 3D Total. I plan to get the other book with that name written by James Gurney I believe.

I have difficulty separating value & color BIG TIME. Through my study I have realized I can let go of trying to be like everyone else who paints in color directly. I just can’t get the image I want when I start with color first. But I can come up with almost any lighting scenario pretty much from imagination without too much stress.

I also use many filter effects/software to help me get to the point you see in the first image. SDFX, Photoshop Filter Gallery, Luminar AI, and Ultralight to name them all. 

I find that my brain works by having an idea of an image, but the details are locked behind 2 big gates. (Gate 1 between line & values, and Gate 2 between value and color)

I am pretty good at sketching something very rough from imagination, but I need references to make it look right, and fill in the gaps of my knowledge.

Afterwards, I like to roughly sketch out the lighting. This can look OK, but not what I want really.

When I filter it, I’m like “YES! That’s the look I am going for, I can work with this.”

I noticed Ilya Kuvshinov tends to do this with his portraits, he’ll blur out the painting he did, and it gives a beautifully creamy base for the brain to use to stitch things together later.

I am noticing that this works with color as well, different apps/filters help me see what the potential could be after messing with the color layers, and then I start painting again from that base.

Now the goal is to learn how to be minimal, and only paint what’s necessary for the viewer, rather than adding ALL the details. I want to keep that cool Depth of Field effect.

That’s all for now, and I hope this helped anyone else struggling with color. I find its really just about sinking in tons of hours studying life/other artwork you like, and trying to do your own version.

There’s no way to really simplify it. It’s like there’s 10,000 little memory nodules you need to collect to be able to paint like the artists I mentioned and they are all equally important so you can’t just simplify it enough to skip putting in the hours. The only thing I think you can skip is the time to find the information & the ‘true fundamentals’ like how to work with these things with oil paints/how digital programs calculate these things, etc.