How to Use Color Theory in Character Design and Like, Actually Know What You're Doing!

[Music] [Applause] hi this is Brooks with character design Forge the subject of color always seems like a large and daunting one it's like it's almost as hard to teach it as it is to learn and I think I have a good idea of why that is the idea of color theory which is this total and complete study of color is absolutely useful but I think there is a difference between theory and practical use and when you're just starting out with color a certain amount of color theory is helpful but then after a certain point it's kind of like asking someone how to take care of a dog and then being told how to take care of every pet simultaneously it's like asking for relationship advice and then being told the history of every relationship since the beginning of time one more shot at this it's like asking someone what they want for lunch and being given a detailed history of the sandwich all right now I'm done this video is not a replacement for learning color theory and I do encourage you to look more into it at a later time but the purpose of this video is to help you get some traction without feeling completely overwhelmed I think part of the reason why color seems to be so hard to teach is that color more so than a lot of other aspects of art is highly subjective which means that apart from some absolute truths some do's and don'ts when it comes to color color choice is highly up to preference it's a very personal thing the same way that people have favorite colors everyone sort of has preferred aesthetics and ways of using colors so it doesn't do me any good to come to you and lay down the law so to speak and say this is a good color to use this is a bad color to use instead I can share those absolute things those color theory things and then also kind of my personal journey and how I've come to create palettes and stuff of my own and then you can take that and do with it what you will I also want to help you if you want to be creating vibrant color palettes to make something that doesn't necessarily become garish so first of all let's establish that color and light are closely linked and before you try and figure out the hue which is like the flavor of the color Allah the color spectrum it's good to know how important value is now value is simply how light or dark something is and you can look at something that's completely grayscale like this and choose a value that is closer to light or closer to black but it isn't just in grayscale for example this is a lighter value green and this is a darker value green understanding value is helpful because you can use it to assign importance to something visually for example if you have a lot of dark gray in an image and then something is suddenly white or really light the eye is immediately drawn to that place value gives you the chance to create contrast in your image to a big part of making good art is creating this hierarchy of importance in your image it's a way to tell a story or communicate where you want the eye to be drawn like for example the face might be the most important place so that's where the eye is drawn to first and then a symbol is on the chest and then the arms and maybe least important in this case are the legs so you can emphasize and de-emphasize those things with value and I'll talk a little bit more about contrast in just a second when it comes to hue it's very helpful to look at a color wheel and this comes from color theory the arrangement of this rainbow around this circle is really useful so you've got our three primary colors which are red blue and yellow and then they're secondary colors between them so orange green and purple now if you draw a straight line through the middle of the circle on either end of it you'll always get a primary color or a closer variation on one end and then the secondary color of the other two primaries on the other end so for example you have blue which is a primary color on one end and the combination of red and yellow which is orange on the other end now these opposite colors are called complementary colors and they tend to look good with each other complementary color schemes are generally the most common and there are more schemes or harmonies as they're called but in an effort to just enable you so that you get your bearings will only look at one other harmony in this video so when I started making digital art I really wanted things to be vibrant and colorful I was designing this cast of multicolored characters but then I'd go into Photoshop to choose a color and I was just choosing this upper right hand corner for almost every color and worse yet I was thinking well this is a comic meant for the internet so let me choose only web colors which you can see all the colors on the internet just fine so the result was things like this background for my self built site let's take a quick look at that yeah so I quickly realized that the colors I was choosing were way too garish and so to overcompensate for that instead of trying to learn how to use vibrant colors in that sort of upper right hand high value high saturation range of the color picker I honestly just became averse to them and I started using pastels and really muted colors so the solution however was something that we already talked about see if all of your colors are high value and highly saturated like that that means that they're all important and all of them are screaming at your eyes all the time saying look at me look at me over here so that along with the fact that these hues don't really go together it makes the overall image clash and we are disgusted and repelled by it so let me show you my current process for selecting a color palette and remember that palettes are tools for different purposes so for me I'm typically creating the color scheme for a character design and they tend to skew a little bit more vibrant if you're setting a scene or you're painting an image trying to establish a certain mood you're going to have to go about selecting your colors in a very different way and you'll just end up creating a different tool generally my current process is to create a color scheme that is both complementary which are those Bassett's that we talked about before and analogous now an analogous color scheme don't let this stuff scare you away it's just a mix of colors that are all next to each other on the color wheel so for the combination of colors that I'm looking for basically think of the shape of a funnel or like a martini glass and that's the shape that we're making on the wheel now as far as how much of each color we end up using in the overall image I like to strike a 75% 25% balance and it usually works out roughly to 70/30 or 8020 this follows the same idea of proportion that we use in the shape language of building character designs what's going to happen is either that 25% really brings out in contrasts part of the image it highlights part of it or it just kind of gets muted and it's a place of visual rest on your image and remember my backdrop your eyes need a place to rest when I'm picking out this analogous scheme I'm usually working from light to dark in value as well as moving around the wheel in hue so if I was just choosing green from this one section of the wheel for my light and dark colors without changing the hue it comes out like this it's not bad but maybe it's a little bit boring whereas if I start with this slightly more yellow green and then work my way darker and toward blue they just look a lot more interesting next to each other now we have our analogous colors so let's move along the tip of our funnel to the other side of the wheel so this opposite of our middle color in the analogous is going to be this red here now because we want our green to be the dominant color we don't want the red to be fighting with it for visual importance and the thing is that because of contrast in hue a less saturated or more muted red will actually appear redder than it is next to a green so we don't need to pick a red that's super vibrant to make it appear red next to the green we can actually mute it pretty significantly when it comes to rendering adding light and shadow to this artwork that you've just made with your new color palette it makes a huge difference what color light and shadow you use so if you're using just pure white and pure black for your light and shadow the image is going to come out really flat so for more about that I'm going to point you up to another video of mine that's called lighting and shading with complementary colors also put it at the end of this video and a link as well so there you go I've given you a ton of information hopefully enough to enable you without overwhelming you there's plenty more to be said about color and more videos to be made by me things like storytelling setting a mood and more things about rendering so just look for more stuff like that in the future if you want more about color you can go to my comprehensive character design curriculum called learn character design it's over 10 hours of video learning whether you don't know how to draw yet or you just want to level up your character design skills it's going to get you to a place where you can be confident in your ability for more head over to learn character design com that's it for me today I'm making new videos every week at character design forge subscribing on YouTube lets you know when new videos are made available if you want to follow me elsewhere the username is bagel den ism and that's consistent across Twitter Instagram and twitch twitch is a fairly new thing that I'm doing head over there and follow so you can see the next time on live stream and some heart come hang out it'll be a fun time thank you for watching and have fun creating

Channel: Brookes Eggleston - Character Design Forge

Views: 239,846

Keywords: color theory, tutorial, color, art, character design, illustration, complimentary colors, hue, saturation, value, painting, speedpainting, learn character design, color pallette, learn color theory, photoshop, digital art, digital illustration, comics, comic, animation, characters, yoshi, luigi, artistic growth, how to be an artist, color mixing, art tutorials, brookes eggleston, brookes eggleston color

Id: W2LJAP-Srhk

Length: 10min 28sec (628 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 10 2017