Color Theory - A Beginners Guide

my introduction to color theory came early my mom slapped down a box of crayons on the table and said bradley these should keep you busy for an hour while i'm at jazzercise whoa this wasn't one of those eight cram boxes no we're talking 64 colors green rainforest green pine green caribbean green sham rock green and stop talking to yourself ladies will think you're weird hi today we're going to be learning all about color theory are you going to give us all our own box of crayons and then do jazzercise no we live in the future we're using future things like these color wheels color pickers like this one come in all shapes and sizes but i like this one it's my favorite i'm naming it name it joe you already named the question giraffe joe oh speaking of joe he has another question how do you make a color wheel great question you make a color wheel by starting with the three primary colors red yellow and blue by mixing these three colors we can make other colors red plus yellow makes orange yellow plus blue makes green blue plus red makes purple now these colors we call our secondary colors if you keep combining each color with the one next to it and making color babies eventually you're gonna get a nice smooth gradient i'm just gonna speed up the process here there we go gradient cool great lesson yeah i liked it let's go to recess oh wait i'm just i'm just getting started once you choose your color from the outside part of the wheel you can adjust the settings of that color in the inner circle colors have settings yeah sure there are three we're going to be looking at hue saturation and value i need three volunteers not it me either he's going to pick us anyway dude hugh is one of the main properties of color when most people say the word color they are thinking about the hue in painting a hue is the pure pigment one without tint or shade here i'll paint you with a pure hue oh wow the outside circle of our color wheel is the hue it doesn't matter what color you pick if you get the pure hue it's pretty intense volunteer number two you're gonna be helping us with saturation this is the intensity of the color decreasing the saturation pushes it more into the grays if something is desaturated it looks more washed out it's not as intense or as bright more saturated your color is the more vibrant it is on our inside color circle this is controlled by sliding your color setting from right to left i look normal now volunteer number three you're gonna be valued this is how light or dark your color is in traditional painting this is done by adding black or white paint to your main hue in our color picker this is controlled by sliding the color settings up and down you learned all this from a box of crayons well not exactly i feel another flashback coming off brad's color mistake number one way too much saturation when i was a wee little lad i did a lot of strange things this is food or adhesive something i did a lot when i started out was way too much saturation i think this came from that eight pack of crayons it had the primary colors red blue yellow the secondary colors green orange and purple and a black and white crayon thrown in for funsies the colors that came in the box were the most saturated colors that's how i learned to color this is red this is blue this is green this is yellow boom done i would like my sticker now what did he say but if you look at drawings even drawings that look really bright and colorful they don't often use the most intense versions of the colors that we're used to that's where that 64-pack of crayons comes in that had a whole lot of variations some were less saturated they had different hues they had different values you could just do so much more with those crayons take this thumbnail from one of my other videos i like to use really bold colors colors that are gonna stand out when you're scrolling through all the videos on a youtube homepage this red it looks pretty bright but if i use pure saturated red it would look like this yeah that is too much if i chose the most saturated blue yeah it gets even worse let's take a look at our color picker we're right here on the red scale as you can tell the saturation is dialed down a bit from the most intense hue that we can get and the more we pull it back to the left the less saturated it's going to be let's look at that blue hue it would be here but what i actually used is way down here almost every time i pick a color it's nowhere near the most saturated version available i am almost always dialing down my color intensity i'm getting this all down don't use oversaturated colors never ever use them no that's not no i don't mean that at all saturated colors can be incredibly effective but you have to know when to use them have you ever gone to a store to buy a chair and you pick up one of those flyers and ask yourself i wonder what's for sale and it screams at you look at me i'm for sale hey over here i want to be your chair so bad right now they're using every color and shape they could throw onto the page it hurts it hurts my eyes so much the problem is is when you make everything exciting nothing is exciting colors work the same way when every color is loud and vibrant hey look over here look at me yo buddy i'm so red right now you lose focus what should my eye even be looking at but what if you peel back some of these colors and choose one color and push the saturation up on that one that has the effect of pulling in your attention to that part of the drawing if you have multiple characters in a panel and one of them is talking you may want to use saturation to pull focus to that character or if it's an action scene you can use saturation to draw attention specifically to that action the more detailed your drawing gets the harder it is to tell what the user should be focusing on when they look at it color saturation is one of the tricks you can use that can really help that out i have an activity for y'all it's all about saturated colors and you guessed it we're gonna be choosing less saturated colors and toning down an image i have a sample image here you can use one of your own or you could snag mine for free over on brad's artschool.com first off try coloring this the way you normally would and then do a second version where you take those colors and you dial down the saturation experiment with this after you've dialed them down you can always jump back in figure out where you want the emphasis to be and increase the saturation to that color colors are a very powerful way to tell a story what do you want to put someone's focus on in your drawing what do you want them to notice pump up the saturation in those colors great activity can we have recess now no i'm not done making mistakes another common mistake in the color world is contrast too much or too little this is where our friend value comes in take this drummer for example the character looks kind of flat kind of muddy even though i'm using different colors they all have a similar value just by shifting the background color to something lighter we instantly have improved this illustration we can do that with all of the other colors too this is easier to demonstrate in black and white these colors have the same value if we desaturate them you can see that they're a similar shade of gray a good illustration is going to have really dark colors and really light colors and everything in between and like value the more contrast there is between two colors the more it's going to stand out within your illustration let's take another look at this drawing you can get a sketch version or an inked version for free at bradstartschool.com this time i added some black outlines one reason is outlines work so well for comic arts because you don't have to worry about color contrast as much the black outlines are already providing a lot of contrast for you but just because it's easier doesn't mean you shouldn't be thinking about contrast if we add a foreground maybe some curtains if we want to draw attention away from those we don't want that to be the focus we want to draw attention away from those so what i'm going to do is i'm going to use a darker color as my fill color why less contrast less contrast equals less focus same with the background we could even make the line art behind the drummer lighter not black but like a slightly lighter shade like a dark brown then when we add our color to the drummer he's still gonna stand out even though we've added a lot of information to this illustration and we're doing this all through color contrast give us another activity yeah you don't want to go to recess no it started raining oh okay well that makes sense well let's talk about color theory and how it can affect your mood we've changed the color and the saturation of this image and it conveys a completely different emotion it went from a bright and sunny day to a cloudy and a rainy day there's a lot written out there about the psychology of colors and there's something to that different colors have different meanings right red danger orange creativity yellow happiness green natural things like leaves i guess blue water calm purple wealth and ambition black death or power white purity or cleanliness even though you see this all over i wouldn't put that much weight into this especially if you're just starting out and learning color i think looking at color this way is gonna limit your creativity more than expand it also our reaction to colors vary from culture to culture from country to country as well for example red could definitely mean danger stop signs are red poisonous berries are red blood is red but when i see these logos i don't i don't think danger so for now i would take this and i just file it in a drawer somewhere you're off the hook coca-cola what's more important is looking at how we can use these colors together for example the colors over here are often considered warm colors and the colors over here are considered to be cool colors so it's not surprising that many high energy brands are choosing warmer colors while brands that are trying to look established and trustworthy are choosing cooler colors our picture went from using warm colors to cool colors and that changes how you perceive the scene when using this in conjunction with contrast and saturation you have a lot to play with when you're picking out a color palette you can take a monochrome color palette and make it really fun by just grabbing one color that's on the other side of our color wheel spectrum you'll often hear this referred to as a complementary color wow you're looking good today green those new shoes i guess the thing i really want to nail here is that you shouldn't go and pick your colors all willy-nilly it's great to have a palette something that's chosen with purpose instead of just grabbing random colors from your palette and then you fall back into the problem of what should i be paying attention to here does anybody have any questions hey where where did everybody go oh it stopped raining well for those of you watching at home check out some of the other art lessons i have up here on the youtube we could learn about perspective you could draw a human head i got a whole playlist if there's something specific you want to learn that i haven't covered yet let me know down below in the comments

Channel: Brad's Art School

Views: 282,972

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Id: NBg3GjrcMF4

Length: 10min 45sec (645 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 14 2021