Create Color Schemes for Your Art!

artist lauren welch and i am here today with professor lou and today we are going to be talking about how to create color schemes for your artwork if your studio habits need a kick in the butt artproff has everything you need tutorials critiques and professional development so clara why would it be important to have a color scheme for your work i think color is a great way to set the mood for a piece because people have very different associations with color and so for example we're looking at here these paintings by lisa yuskavich she's a contemporary figure and i love how the mood just changes with each of her paintings and so that's a great way to just establish an emotional connection with the viewer why else do you think a color scheme is necessary lauren i find color schemes really important for unifying an image and showing what is important and what is more background i think the thing that you said about the emotional tenor is really important and i like to make sure that there is some amount of world believability in my paintings i think if you've got a bad color scheme it can be really feel really chaotic it makes the piece feel disjointed people don't know where to look so you can use it as a directory towards different parts of the piece well do you think lauren that color scheme is something that really has to be thought about in advance or do you think you can just make it up as you go along oh well okay so it depends on the person but for someone like me who is obsessed with color and colors and putting colors together i need to plan this stuff beforehand because what happens and i think this happens for a lot of people is they will go into making a painting or a drawing or a digital image and they will think okay i'm going to add this color and then a few seconds later they are like okay i'm going to add another color and then they keep doing this it's like eating potato chips you don't realize you've eaten too many potato chips until the whole bag is gone and i think colors operate the same way where there's no rhyme or reason you just end up with too many in a single piece and it gets muddy that's not to say that you can't make adjustments because i think for a lot of artists maybe they go in with an idea but maybe as they're working on the piece they make minor tweaks because right now we're looking at the stinky cheese man tell me you guys if you've read this book before i love this book this book is hysterical i mean my kids sort of grew up on this book but you can see looking at it that as wacky as it is it's got almost this antique look and what's interesting is as you go through the book he starts introducing bolder colors like for example this burnt sienna that's in the fox it's not visible in some of the other areas and this one's a little bit more green so it's not to say that you can't depart from the color scheme i just think it's something that should be thought about first and then tweet because really honestly i think the issue with color schemes people it doesn't occur to people to make a color scheme do you think that's true yeah definitely i think people treat color as this thing that they apply on top of their drawing drawing is really prioritized and this has just been across particularly european art western art history it's always about the drawing drawing drawing you make that image that is the rational side and then color is really seen as this cosmetic additive that is not as interesting or important so people think they can just pull things together and use it to decorate the image and i i don't think that's the case at all this is a great comment from ten thousand crows who says my high school senior project was about the psychology of color theory i love learning about color and how it affects people absolutely i mean we're looking at these paintings by picasso and picasso had these two periods the blue period and the rose period and you can see very visibly that these have a very somber almost melancholy tone to them but then when you switch to the rose period it doesn't feel as depressing for lack of a better word it feels just a little bit more optimistic which i like a lot now lauren when we look at these you'll notice a lot of these palettes are limited that there are certain colors that just don't make it into the painting do you think that's a good place to start if you're not very good at color schemes like me oh yeah totally i think having a very limited palette is a great way to start exploring the differences between colors and how colors play with each other without creating a disaster i think sometimes when you're picking across the entire color wheel and putting things together the color choices are so diverse and all over the place that you can't really see why one color is interacting in a certain way to another color i think that's the really important thing is that color is extremely plastic it's not set in stone every color is affected by the colors around it you've seen probably joseph albers color theory kind of stuff where you have these little color dots in the center it's an eye trick and the colors are technically the same but the surrounding color around it makes it look like those individual dots inside are two different colors so that's just an example of how crazy it can get on a very simplistic level i think another thing to consider is that color is really about relationships because what i see a lot when people use color is they get really fixated on one color they say i need to mix the right blue this is the blue i'm trying to get but really sometimes the way to get that right blue is to fix the color that's next to it yeah so for example if you have a blue or here we're looking at this windsor mckay image okay you got really bright yellow streaks going across and you'll notice that all the colors that surround the yellow are pretty muted it's like you've got yellow ochres you've got browns and these grayish blues if everything in the background was cadmium red like forget about it so that's what i think really a color scheme is it's almost like a group of curated people like you don't want to just snatch random people off the street you know you want to find people that are going to work well together so that's one way to think about that definitely okay so we have some comments also neil is saying i loved lauren's stream where she talked about different types of red paint and neil is also saying i love making small collage pieces to experiment and explore color combinations what do you think about that lauren yeah so do i neil i actually have a few examples of physical little collage bits that i've saved because i love the color schemes and i can show a couple of those here um i have this really cool brooklyn defender ipa package that looks like a it looks like a firework or a comic book or something so that red yellow blue is something that i want to use and put together and then i also have i take from this particular book all the time it's a really old um ethan allen interior design book from the 60s or 70s and there are images like this that are the colors are just wild and i love cutting those out and putting them together here's another one that i think is just insane um i don't know if you can see that there yeah so i i i reference paper things a lot and love to put them together for colors i think it goes to show that you don't have to look only at artwork for color schemes you can see it anywhere like you just pulled out a box from beer bottles i could be a postcard that you see it could be a sunset that you see so you guys can really mine from anything there's another one this is by this is a photo by steve lepofsky i went to one of his shows and took this little card because the colors on it are really good now lauren you have this wonderful process for coming up with colors games i feel a little dumb that i never do this but it's largely because i'm scared of color and so you know let's just avoid it by working monogrammatically so let's walk through your color scheme process because it's quite brilliant and i'd really encourage you guys to give this a shot so we're looking at a salt becker painting tell us what you're gonna do with this so i really loved the mood and the color combos in the saul becker painting and i wanted to figure out sometimes it's hard when you're looking at an image to figure out okay what are the actual colors that are going into this because as we just talked about they're all affecting each other so it's hard to pull out any individual ones so one thing i sometimes like to do is go into photoshop and then use the make these little boxes these little swatch boxes and use the color eye dropper tool to pick out places within the painting that are a certain color and i'll do this with the colors that i feel like i see the most within the painting or the colors that are having a big impact on the mood of the painting and i will do usually between four and six of these little swatches use the paint bucket tool once i have the eyedropper color picked out and then i will fill in the swatch so you're seeing the steps on the screen here these are screenshots from me doing it for this painting and then so i'm not being derivative of the painting too much i will take out the painting image and just keep the swatch and then i will use that to create my painting which is never it's not exactly like the color scheme of the previous painting but it's clearly built off of it into a way that i i felt worked for me i like this comment a little tip from raindrops procreate has a new feature where you can have an instant color palette by placing a certain photo on the swatches oh man we're gonna need jordan to explain us how to do that and king of the fall says when i plan a painting i use procreate especially helpful when planning color schemes then i take what works best for my piece and mix my actual paints from there yeah i know a lot of people when they're doing digital painting especially what they oftentimes do is just have a little palette on the sides it's easier for them to reference the actual colors when they're working so i feel like this is a really great way to go about doing it yeah usually i don't do this online so much anymore i've come to a point in my art life where i'm comfortable enough with color to pick out the um the the colors manually on my own use um markers to make swatches of it and then i will still use those swatches and then use it for mixing my paints to make my painting cerulean says photoshop will also summarize the colors in an image for you you just have to enter how many colors you want photoshop to summarize that is so cool i have no idea you could do that yeah thanks for watching w315 says you can get a color look up table out of photoshop if you convert it to gif and fiddle the options wow that very savvy guys so many processes here to use guys this is incredible thank you so tell us about this lois dog painting and why you chose it so this is something that i've become kind of obsessed with over the past few years as i am really comfortable with high saturation and middle saturation in my work but i have a lot of trouble with making desaturated paintings either white paintings i call them white paintings or black paintings where the color that primarily your primary impression is white in this but it's really made up of different colors which i've laid out here and so i've had to do this a lot trying to figure out how to make a snow painting how to make a a white sheet painting is i'll mix up these really really pale neutrals and try to place them together in the same way so i've looked at lois dot a lot for those snow paintings and i think this painting here the next slide is yeah and see i'm still struggling because the the saturation really my painting still feels a lot brighter than louis dodds and i feel like that is a failure i really wanted to go for desaturated but that is in certain areas you can really see it working or coming together like these colors on the left here really fit within this little swatch of the painting that i did lauren what do you think is the role of value in color schemes because i'm looking at the color scheme here and i'm noticing they're pretty close in value do you feel that having too broad of a range of values makes it harder for the color scheme to be cohesive i that's actually a difficult question so a couple years ago i would say yes it would make it harder but what i have found is that when your values are very very narrow and close together what that means is that your then the contrast in your saturation becomes really apparent so what happens for me is i make these white paintings that all have super narrow values but then look super colorful because everything is the same tonal like tone but the colors are all different so it looks like sherbet so you actually want to have at least one really dark tone in there to then make all the rest of the things look more related to each other if that makes sense contrast is very important i like the suggestion from w315 because as much as we've had a lot of suggestions for procreate in photoshop you can go to the hardware store and get paint swatches of all their shades of white that's more my thing because while i use photoshop for a lot of things i love the hands-on process and touching all those paint swatches it's really really fun so if you guys are at the hardware store next time that's something you can try potato fat says i feel that colors that contrast each other bring out certain aspects is there a way where these colors can also complement each other as in how they can match each other any thoughts lauren so i i think i need a little bit of clarity on this question are you talking about analogous color are you talking about complementary colors like red green blue yellow or are you talking about analogous colors like red red orange orange you know everything is hot there are different ways that colors can match each other and relate to each other i definitely think a lot about light in my paintings and how color represents light and shadow so i use a ton of purple and yellow combinations with purple being the shadow and yellow being the light and i think that is a great way to read this there is a kind of matching involved in that that is based off of this tonal this this tonal opposite and this hue opposite hue being purple is the opposite of of yellow but the tone being purple is a really dark color and yellow is a really light color let's take a look at this painting by billy childish and by the way lauren how do you pick these paintings are you just looking at stuff online and say hey that's cool i like it or the particular places you look for paintings to mine from oh totally i surf a lot on instagram and i follow a lot of artists and that's it's the best and worst thing i have my saved section is entirely beautiful color palettes that i would love to use sometimes but there's also this it can almost be too influential where i will just be taking color palettes that aren't mine and suddenly using them in ways that i figure out are really derivative later the other thing that i do is i go to shows in person here in new york there's a ton of shows that i can go see and i'll pick up postcards from the shows i'll take photos of work in the shows and i'm always focused on this color it's a it's like spying on other artists to see what they're using that i can use we have a question from neil who says i find it hard to think about color and values at the same time any tips well neil i think what happens more often is once color enters the picture people tend to forget about value because the thing is you can have a red and a green that are maybe close in value but because it's red and green you're like oh i'm all set i got my contrast going on and so i would just say when you work with color you can't forget about value because it doesn't usually go the other way around usually color is the one that people find is more dominant it always always takes over so value gets the short end of the stick i i've got a good technical tip for that too that can keep that in your mind as you're working and that is to create an under painting i always really poo poo'd under paintings i was like oh this is so old school who even does this i'm a spontaneous painter but in this past year i've found it is extremely helpful to at least have a map that is all in this all in a single color it's all one hue but you're really only working with tone picking out the lightest lights on the darkest darks then you can work on applying your color on top of that and you've got a value guide to help you mix your paints raindrops is saying do you usually change the tones of a reference to make it more appealing no i don't or i don't really play with the image in photoshop i'm just not i'm not that picky i guess but uh what happens in my paintings a lot of the time is that i think i i tend to over compensate towards more saturated colors without realizing they're more saturated again this is a matching things that are of similar tone together can make it look super saturated even if they are technically speaking the same color and also some of the paintings that you're seeing on my end here the reason why they're appearing super saturated is sometimes because of my camera picking up it picks up oranges really intensely in a way that is not super true to the to the reference i think i mean i think another thing to consider in terms of the color references is what is the grouping of colors and how many are in there because i'm looking at this and i could just boil it down to yellow ochre and variations of blue and so you sort of have to think about what is the closeness of those colors like the blue here is actually very different in value because one of the blues is really dark to the point that it's almost black and the other one is really light and so the distance and value is actually quite strong so value does play a pretty important role in that sense what about this howl's moving castle you actually look at a lot of films yeah most of the ones most of the examples i have here come from paintings because i feel like it's easy to match paint with paint but i look at a ton of films because i think film is when you're watching a film they are responsible for creating that world for you to create the lighting affect the mood so you feel like you're in it it's it's really the highest most extreme example you can get of being immersed in a world so their their color schemes are usually really really good especially these more arty films any studio ghibli is like really on point with getting a certain color mood across to convey that magic i use this particular still so often i use it in a lot of pieces i'll reuse references over and over and over again but pick out different points in the palette and different combinations of the colors to create different images this is one version but i also use a lot i use this still too in that in that green house painting earlier that i did um i love looking at films because another thing that they do i had no idea until i watched the dvd extras on lord of the rings a million years ago back when they had dvd extras is what they actually did with lord of the rings is they did the filming and of course they have a color scheme with the lighting and the props and everything but they said after that in post-production they actually do color grading so they will take a scene and just make it more blue yeah so that makes it more cohesive because everything across the still becomes more blue and it totally makes sense because what you're really doing with a color scheme is you're making connections you're trying to keep the painting from feeling fragmented like lauren you ever see these paintings i call them rainbow paintings yes and they're all over the place like what's wrong with that i i've made many of those paintings this is the tragedy right clara i have always been in love with color and have been a color nerd on the super scientific and experiential level but my paintings for so long were described in critique as clown vomit and in poor taste because they were so intense and just all the colors of the rainbow all stuck together and what that made me realize after really discussing it with my mentor a lot is that i needed more i needed to be looking less at the science and the color theory of it and more at color in practice which is why i'm bringing up the films the paintings my outfits was what he originally told me to look at because technically i can match colors really well together it was just in a different arena of my life well i wonder lauren if maybe each of us has tendencies towards certain things because my tendency is monochrome you give me one color i am so happy but once you say to me pump it up with saturated colors my brain goes no i can't do it but i feel like you're the opposite where your tendency is the bright brilliant colors and for you it doesn't feel that natural to do a monochromatic colors game right right it just i i've never gravitated towards beiges or browns i still don't use brown in my painting that's something that i'm trying to work on but even if it is forefront in my mind kind of similar to neil's comment earlier it will just slip out because color is so seductive you really get wrapped up in the experience of each color so i see that cadmium red and i am like oh i want cadmium everywhere i love this color but then immediately two seconds later i see a beautiful lemon yellow and i'm like oh i need this i need to put this everywhere it's such a wonderful color so you have to be thinking about color holistically and not as these individual beautiful colors well lauren do you have any advice for people like me who are challenged with color because i know for a lot of people color is very intimidating and a lot of people really don't know where to start so would this be a good way to get started just to mine from your favorite movie or something so you have a little structure because i would have no idea where to start yeah i would definitely start with movies specifically because of the things that we just talked about with the intention of the movie sometimes painters are purposely trying to manipulate you and put you in this fragmented kind of world but movies really want these unified palettes so i definitely even just on youtube will take stills from trailers and stuff like that i think also a good hack is if you do get too far into a painting and you have way too many colors and you get lost one thing that is great is you can put a wash of a color over the entire painting and that immediately unifies it kind of like the color grading that they do in films so just treat your painting like a film still or making a film and you'll probably be okay well i really like this strategy that hajirak is suggesting i also use so much color saturation and then i go back and try to tame it down later i actually think that's great because here's the thing at least for me i find it easier to tone down a bright color than to make a muted color brighter some of it is technique sometimes you're using chalk pastels it's just harder to put a color on top of another i feel like in painting it's a little bit easier because you really can paint over things yeah but certainly you can have that in mind before you paint anything and just say that's my approach i'm going to start with colors that are too bright and then i'm going to go in and tame it out do you ever do that on purpose like make it too bright and then fix it um what is too bright clara well too right for me let's just say straight out of the cheek how about that yeah i think that it it really does depend on the medium if you're working and i work in acrylic so i can just put whatever on top of a previous color and it's fine but if you're working in a pastel or a colored pencil you have to be aware of how things optically mix together those other layers behind it are always going to come through to a certain extent so you can sometimes i find if i put say a really intense color like phthalo blue if i use a phthalo blue pencil or oil paint or whatever it's really hard to tone that down afterwards because the pigment is so intense that it's easier to start with the desaturated and work your way up than the opposite just depends on your situation well it also depends on the opacity or transparency of the paint like i remember there's this one painting i was doing and there was a cello in it and i remember thinking i can't do this in one layer so what i ended up doing was opaque burnt sienna just to lay the foundation and then i did a transparent glaze of alizarin crimson over and i it nailed it it was perfect so a lot of times colors can't be done in one layer sometimes you have to build them up for them to make a little more sense lindsay is saying i watched your watercolor tutorial on utah found it really interesting that you said you like to have tons of colors when you're using watercolor but only a few with oil well that brings up this idea lauren of how many colors to have on your palette like your literal palette do you like having eight blues and five yellows or do you try to keep it more limited oh man i i do try to keep it limited but in a strategic way i it depends on the temperature of your painting what types of reds you choose or what types of blues that you choose it also depends on how how analogous the painting is like how how narrow the the color range or the tonal range is so but what i try to do is start with five colors i think that's really my number and if i need to add more i can mix more but i really want to to come up with the five most important colors in the piece where i can mix things out of it later and lauren do you pre-mix before you actually start painting or do you mix as you go i i mostly pre-mix it takes a long time to pre-mix colors even though i'm only using a few it can take me a day or two in studio to get the right color set that i need to begin i like pre-mixing my colors for oil because it lets me paint in a more streamlined way because mixing colors takes a while like you really have to put pressure with that palette knife and i find if i have to like mix for five minutes and then paint with a brush and then yeah it feels like it's all over the place whereas if i just make something advanced i just paint paint paint and not worry about it yeah 100 agree with that i don't think it's super useful to be halfway through a painting and then realize oh i need another color that is nothing like anything i have on here it gets very confusing i want to focus on making the painting not trying to fit my colors or mix my colors this is a great comment from robert who says we do a wash over drops in the theater business as well to bring a piece together i'm so glad you brought up theater because i feel like theater everything's live and so you can't plan it in well you are playing in advance but you are like timing it and everything and especially with lights lighting is so important like you guys will notice that when you have natural light natural light has a cool tone to it but if it's lighting that's indoors it's usually yellowish unless it's fluorescent which is more cool we probably should have a whole stream about light and color and how they affect each other but for sure that that's a really important thing to think about so let's look at the life aquatic why did you choose this film lauren uh well this is one of several wes anderson examples that we have in here someone in the chat mentioned wes anderson earlier and he is really one of my favorites in choosing color or compositional references for paintings because he really thinks like a painter and this the life aquatic has this very trendy kind of palette where there are all these neutrals and grays and then this one really limey yellow chartreuse color and i picked this out specifically because i remember once in my class i was painting with fluorescent yellow because i wanted to pick the yellowest yellow of all time this is how i operate i need to use the bluest blue and the yellowest yellow and he told me this is not a great way to go about it because fluorescent paint it's not light fast it is it also will not look the yellowest yellow an easy way not an easy way but a more seductive way to do it is to make a super super neutral gray a dark gray and then put that yellow next to it and that will make the yellow feel very fluorescent to anybody that's looking at it so that's how i feel about this piece here that yellow really pops because of all the grays around it you know what i think that muted colors are severely under appreciated because if you look at this still it's the yellow that pops out they're getting all the attention and really the way i think about muted colors they're there to make the saturated colors look better but they don't get any credit right they don't get the spotlight oh totally the foundation is all about the neutral colors it's really if you don't know your neutral colors you are going to have a hard time with your saturated colors they work together as a even even if you're thinking about a gallery and having art on these white walls why are the walls white it's something about the white even though we're not supposed to to look at it really so all of these things they really play together in these really integral ways and if you guys look at some edward hopper paintings or some degap paintings you'll notice that actually most of the painting is muted colors there are not that many saturated colors i almost think about saturated colors it's almost like you have a pile of dirt and then you found a jewel and so you need the power the pile of dirt to make the jewel look extra pretty so you do have to think about it in terms of supporting colors yeah we have a question from cerulean how would you stop the acrylics from drawing when you mix over a couple of days condiment cups i mix all of my paints in condiment cups and those little olive containers the little short ones and i try to mix more color than i need because then i can use it for future things without having to mix new paints and then i also put in a little bit of acrylic retarder and spray the paint every few days if i can remember and this keeps it lasting for a really long time i've had some acrylic paints this gets kind of gross i've had some acrylic paints in the same containers that are still wet that are several years old that i've mixed well alex rowe who works in gouache he told me he just mixes stuff and he's got pallets that have been sitting around for 10 years and he can just re-wet the gouache and use the color again so i think brilliant to have that happen bee dog boo says i have to choose two to three colors for my paintings or it'll turn out looking like a lisa fragrance if you guys don't know lisa frank look up lisa frank i was obsessed with it in the fourth grade i collected all the stickers i had a sticker collection but yeah they're really garish what about this film lauren the color of pomegranates this film is oh it's such a weird film i watched this when i was a sophomore freshman at risd and i it's kind of a hard film to get through but it's really beautiful it's like looking at a series of paintings really every still is amazing and it's highly constructed and the palettes are highly constructed and the colors are really socially and culturally and emotionally symbolic so i while i haven't had very much success with getting through the entire film in one go i have had the same stills from this movie saved i have so many stills from this movie that i will use for paintings and it's really good also for the neutral aspect as well i think this is one of the only films in here so far that has been really focused on neutral colors well lauren i'm really glad you brought up the cultural references because there are certain cultures where colors have a specific meaning or they symbolize something so that's probably another topic for another stream but what we're trying to say is color really matters it really affects the way people look at things so this is an interesting one by peter doyle because this one the colors are really dark and the four was at the top you almost can't see the difference so why do you think this one works lauren i think this has a lot to do with the contrasts that are happening here and also line weight really there's we have to think about other like color is a world unto itself but also the way an image is constructed with the line quality and the shapes and all that and the proportions of colors is also really important to how the color will be perceived so the one thing that i notice about this piece is all of it is most of these really dark blues greens reds like super super dark but then there's that one streak of that that brighter vermillion color in there and that your eye just zooms into that and then it leads you into the back of all these other colors so it's really creating a depth thing here but i do want to say the one artist that i wanted to include here that i couldn't i had to use peter doyg instead is carrie james marshall if you want to see someone who is really good at using black both in a color context but also a social cultural emotional context he's done a ton of black paintings and blackness using black for the skin that is just incredible it'll blow your mind but some of the pieces are so dark together there's one piece i've looked over a zillion times it's just a black room that appears as almost nothing on a computer screen it doesn't translate that well but it's amazing in person by the way you guys another way to collect color schemes is to create a mood board i know a lot of people make these on pinterest and we actually have this stream where jordan talks about creating mood boards for character design but this could easily play into color schemes and so that's a good way i think to keep track of your references our prof has a podcast it's available on spotify and also on itunes in a few minutes lauren and i will be hanging out in the art prof discord please meet us in the post live streams channel if you are not in the artprof discord shame on you you should join today the invite link is in the video description below and we have lots of great discussions we've got critique channels so come hang out with us please subscribe to our channel and join the rpra family and thank you to our top patreon supporters for giving us the support that we need to keep all of our content a hundred percent free and accessible and thank you to everybody for all the suggestions the discussions all the different points of view are so so helpful when we're trying to give you guys a comprehensive view of a topic so thank you so much for watching we'll see you next time bye

Channel: Art Prof: Create & Critique

Views: 7,175

Rating: 4.9651165 out of 5

Keywords: color tutorial, color schemes, color scheme, color palettes, color palette, how to draw, color palettes in film, color tips, artist color painting, artist color palette, palette colors, color theory for artists, color techniques in film, color techniques, color palette in movies, color grading in movies, color schemes in movies, best color in movies, color movie scenes, color in filmmaking, color mixing paint, color mixing, color mixing experiment

Id: lmszxYMfkTo

Length: 42min 5sec (2525 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 18 2020