justinoaksford:

Notes for an Anon who asks, 


“ Hey Justin, thanks for your reply earlier. Just wanted to expand on my previous ask - do you have any tips for achieving colour harmony across an entire painting? I often feel like the objects in my paintings look disjointed, like I haven’t chosen the ‘right’ brown for trees or the ‘right’ green for grass when I use opaque brushes, this isn’t so much of an issue when I’m painting a single object or character but when painting an entire scene I find it very difficult to tie everything together. “

btw, this is COMPLETELY UNACADEMIC- I mean, parts may be “academic” but this is not meant to be a textbook. Terms are used VERY CASUALLY and the information is not at all comprehensive. This is an extremely brief superficial look at the term “Color Harmony”.

If you want ACTUAL color education, either take Sam Nielsen’s Schoolism class, or get James Gurney’s Color and Light book, or do both!!!!!

That said, I hope it helps some folks!

Reblogged from how-to-art

tsuaii:
“Short explanation of my process for Autumn!
a — Lines by Raichiyo33
b — Ambient Occlusion (shadows)
c — Flat Colors
d — Ambient Occlusion on top of Flat Colors
e — Key Light (direct sunlight)
f — Reflective Light (from ground)
g —...

tsuaii:

Short explanation of my process for Autumn!

a — Lines by Raichiyo33
b — Ambient Occlusion (shadows)
c — Flat Colors
d — Ambient Occlusion on top of Flat Colors
e — Key Light (direct sunlight)
f  — Reflective Light (from ground)
g — Atmospheric Light (from sky)
h — Light Sources all combined
i  — Additional effects and fixes (light bloom, dusty lens, loose hair, specular highlights)

I plan on doing a few tutorials and sharing some detailed process work in January, all of which will be available to my Patreon supporters in advance!

Reblogged from drawingden

annmarcellino:

Tumblr sized these images down and refuses to give a decent preview, please click on the image and “view image” to see a larger version, full vertical paintings are on the right and below the top most preview.

Return of the Heart and Return of the Spirit for Spirit of the Wind - A Studio Ghibli Tribute Show.

If you are interested in seeing the show check out the event page on facebook. There will be two show exclusive giclee prints hanging in the gallery as well as some small regular prints for sale!

Reblogged from kupobox

Anonymous asked:

Stumbled across your art recently, and I totally admire your work! As a complete noob to the digital art scene, I'd just like to ask whether you have any tips on colour picking (like for skin tones, under varied/dramatic lighting and such!). I have a ton of other things I want to ask, but I'll limit myself to one question and then try to google the rest, haha/ Thanks for sharing your art with us! ^^

cranbearly answered:

ahh thank you so much! ♥ welcome to the digial art scene friend, i hope you enjoy your stay and ctrl + z

now onto your question! (if you don’t know what layer and layer modes are and how they generally work you should probably google that before you continue reading)

we all perceive colour differently (thx science) and i trust my intuition a lot when it comes to colour picking because of that, and also because i feel like you can make pretty much every colour combination work within the right context. context is key! but still, remember that all of this is about how i perceive colour, so you might not agree with everything i say.

image

here’s a quick rundown of terms you’ll see around a lot in reference to colours and shading: the hue, which is the ‘colour’ itself, the saturation aka the intensity, and the brightness [or value] which describes how dark or bright we perceive a colour to be.

rule of thumb: when you shade don’t just add black (or white) to your base colours, that will make your drawings boring and lifeless. use different hues and saturation!

now first things first: which skin colour does the character have?

image

you’ll mostly be navigating in the red to yellow spectrum for the skin tone. so when i pick the base colours i usually start with the skin and adjust the rest of the colours accordingly. if you’re not sure where to begin it might help if you first determine the values (brightness) of the base colours in grayscale.

and here are a few colour variations—i stuck to the approximate values but played around with a lot of different hues and levels of saturation.

image

now compare 3 and 5: you’ll notice that 3 is very bright and leans towards orange hues, whereas 5 has a pinkish tint.

image

on the left i gave 5 the hair colour of 3 and in my opinion the pink hue of the skin doesn’t go well with the orange undertone of the hair. you’ll have to experiment a lot to find out which combinations work for you.  

ctrl + u is your biggest friend (or image >> adjustments >> hue/saturation in photoshop, the shortcut works in sai and clip studio paint too). play with the sliders and see what happens. i do that a lot myself, because it’s easier to coordinate the colours like that afterwards instead of trying to manually pick perfectly matching ones right away.

for further adjustments i like to use an extra semi-transparent layer on top of everything with just a single colour to add atmospheric light. this unifies the colours and makes them more harmonious, if that’s what you’re looking for. this is about as far as i’d go if i didn’t want to shade the drawing.

image

if i do want to shade, especially with high contrasts and dramatic light, i darken the base by just adding an additional black layer, here set to 40% opacity. of course you could add a colour layer like the ones i mentioned previously too.

image
image

to create an impression of dramatic light you need a high contrast between light and dark areas (1). if i want additional visual intrest i often add secondary light which falls onto the main shadow areas. here i picked a faint greenish blue to balance out the yellow (2). and since light is at least partially reflected when it hits a surface you should add a faint glow that goes across the shadow/light border (3).

for this shading style i like to use the layer mode colour dodge with lowered opacity + fill settings. for some layer modes opacity and fill do the exact same thing (e.g. for multiply or screen). however for colour dodge there’s a big difference:

image

a lowered opacity merely alters the transparency of the entire layer. that looks pretty awful sometimes, because the bright orange affects the dark of the hair much more intensely than the already brighter skin. but when you lower the fill percentage you primarily lower the amount of light that falls onto darker colours. so the layer’s opacity setting treats every colour equally whereas the fill setting takes their values into consideration. it might be hard to understand if you don’t try it out yourself, so just play around to get a feel for how it works!

and to summarise, here’s a process gif:

image

colour is an extremely big topic and i’ve only barely scratched the surface but i hope that still helped you out a little! the fastest way to learn is always to try things yourself, so grab a sketch and experiment. 👍