Why Color Studies Are So Powerful

so in my career many people come and ask me how do i get better at understanding color in light it seems a mystery to me and when i was growing up it was too i was okay with the pencil i learned how to draw and my whole world was formed around 2d value-based thinking light and dark simple it's a great way to start we simplify things down but how do you get your brain to branch into color and light and i have found one trick that is more effective than all the others or it's the quickest way i think to to really understand color in light as fast as you can so you can start applying it to any artwork you create and to be able to have really nice colors and how to pick them but this one is the one that i'm starting this whole thing off with and this is simple color studies i think there's two parts to our brain probably why you're watching youtube videos on how to get better at art there's the analytical side of our brain and the analytical side is where you think about things this is where you take classes this is where you learn most people have gone to school you know and your brain is like this is where you learn you learn you learn you learn but when it comes to art i think there's two sides to this there's the analytical side and there's the intuitive side and art needs both it's right there in the middle how do you train your eye to really understand what looks good and why does it look good not just analytically but intuitively so that you know when you do a brush stroke when you when you move a light source when you go and do photography how do you find what looks good versus what doesn't look good and it's a mix of both i remember when i first started work at pixar many years ago every friday morning we'd get together for an hour we'd set up a still life of something like an egg in a bowl and we would paint it everybody stand around and get different angles you know this was the the final result of an hour so we do it in one hour quick study color study material study you would see textures you'd see light it was amazing and we did this week after week crumpled paper a teapot sugar cubes i started with a sketch started to blob in some color get rid of the sketch um kind of refine it along and then here's the final result bottles and reflective surfaces uh all kinds of different things anything anything we could find everybody would bring in different things and we would study subsurface scattering and the way light bounces and the way surfaces work and the way light works and it was amazing there's so many things that i learned to take that knowledge of lighting color and turn it into the intuitive side i start to naturally know how to paint scratches on a surface or wrinkles or subsurface and i get better and better at it and it's something it's like exercising you start little you're gonna have to put in the work and this is where if you really want to understand color and light this is the way to do it and it can be fun and really simple after doing this for for several years i started to want to find story in it so i put little characters in there i put faces on things this was one this is a photograph of you know what our setup was and then you know here's me painting it and then i threw a little story in there i like to call this one skinny dipping fast quick dirty you know just study things do paintings of simple things it was super fun and this is what i want to encourage you to do and we will do together then i took this and started applying it elsewise you know not just lighting a still life in front of me but getting out into nature going and sitting in front of a waterfall can i capture something that's in motion can i draw things not just draw things not like just drawing people again with lines this is studying the color and the light what am i actually seeing you don't see lines when we draw a person we're drawing lines you're not actually seeing that how about you draw exactly what you see the shapes of color and light that's bouncing into your eyes i remember walking to work every day and i would take a picture on my phone of the different light as i walked down this big hill and i'd look at it in snowy weather and in sunny weather and in the summer and in the spring and in the fall and in different type of weather conditions and then do paintings off of that to really sink it in to study exactly what color am i seeing what what is this is an amazing thing that we can try i went out into forests and then starting to learn how to see more how to see themes of color and light and to go i think it would look better if there was a little bit more fog than what i'm seeing so i'm going to paint in some more fog i've experienced doing illustration i'm going to merge reality and start blending things and seeing something better one thing that i really loved about doing color studies with other people was that we'd all be painting the same thing and at the end we'd walk around and see what each other did and we're like whoa you saw something totally different you changed these colors and the artist would be like yeah i just kind of felt like these colors would be better and it made it look awesome and i loved learning from other people the next thing with color studies is not just painting from real life but painting other people's illustrations painting classic paintings i remember traveling to to france and going into the louvre and seeing people that would bring in whole canvases and paint sets and they were allowed to sit there and copy the masters and it's been something that's been done for hundreds of years and i think we often forget this is a way where we learn we do it we copy it we see how other artists work we see and study so this is superpowers we're talking here and then i started coloring from from photos you know i travel and take pictures and then come back and do color studies off them make it really fast try to do something in 10 minutes 15 minutes maybe an hour you could take a couple of hours if you want but just really fast study what exactly makes this appealing then if you you know pandemic time this is perfect you can study off of photos take a photograph and then try to make a copy of it where can it go this is where it gets exciting because i think one of the things that's very discouraging for artists is you start drawing and you're like i want to do amazing concept art i want to do illustrations things that inspire me from movies and i just i have terrible stick figures so where can i go doing little studies doing your push-ups doing your sit-ups eventually will lead to greater tone and strength and muscles here it'll it'll switch your knowledge from analytical into that intuitive side and this is where you can really thrive and it can be exciting so for me i started doing color studies and eventually got to the point where i could take a composition and i could color it lots of different ways and these were 10 minutes each you know and learn to to steal light from other photographs and apply it to your situation and be able to take one thing and see it from all different types of light sources you can make illustrations the same illustration done multiple different ways to really explore this and this can be fast and iterative it doesn't have to be a painstakingly long process you can do it really quickly and that's why i think this is the best way to learn about color and light with this group that got together we would eventually try new things to go well now you've studied all these real worlds objects why not taking the line art from a coloring book you know or from a children's story and turn it into something that the world has never seen and this to me is exciting and it got to the point that you know in my work i was working on ratatouille and i got the opportunity to light sequences that didn't have any art that went along with it and i got to do my own color keys this was so amazing or i even went back just for the fun of it and went back to a sequence i had worked on way back in my career and re-did new color keys to go what would it look like if it was if it was done differently if it was thought at a different time of day this type of stuff is super fun you know take that same idea spend more time refine more details and build full illustrations so this is kind of where it can go i went freelance and i got to paint the cover of the lego magazine you know they went worldwide this is so cool and it was just from learning to understand light in color and how to paint faster better cleaner you know to refine this process and it's really the same process that we're going to talk about and i'm going to show you what i do so that you can learn to do things like this so let's get down to it what are we going to paint so the best way to start with this is to go really simple find an object a simple object put it somewhere take a picture of it we're going to copy this picture a banana an apple an egg eggs are fantastic they're really simple shapes we're studying color and light and how light wraps around surfaces and how light affects surfaces and their local color start really simple with this put it in sunlight what does it do what are the colors what is the difference take that same apple that was on the table and put it down the carpet in the sunlight the the highlights the bounce light the light side the shadow side what does light and color do looking for just pretty objects in your house might lead you astray let's avoid noise this would be a nightmare to paint because there's just tons of noise in this and you can't really see the lighting color you're going to get lost into the details of the object itself surprisingly something as simple as like a shoe sounds like it would be great to paint but careful this this could be a trap too of shapes forms and texture let's avoid that we're not seeing a lot of interesting light and color on this so until you're better at the basics i would avoid something like this eventually sure if you want to paint a shoe paint a shoe avoiding things flat flatly lit you know there's a lot of texture in it we're not doing texture studies quite yet we will get to that but as a beginning let's start with something really really simple really cool texture the way these vines grow up this tree but no this would take forever just shoot me now no thank you let's come back to the banana simple objects banana is a yellow object look at what the light does is it wraps around it we could do this a banana and sunlight a banana close to sunlight but out of the sunlight um ooh a salt lamp this could be a really cool one we should definitely do something like this this one would be a great one to paint because there's interesting color now there's texture in here but we're going to learn to simplify down to light in color in the end i think that great starting point will be an egg there's a lot of interesting things that are happening with color and light in this and it might not seem exciting to paint but trust me let's give this one a try so i'm going to stop here and then in the next video we're going to paint this egg so thanks for watching i hope this is useful

Channel: Lighting Mentor

Views: 805,691

Keywords: light, color, pixar, jeremy vickery, learn, art, lighting, illustration, concept art, painting, drawing, movies, games, learning, study, teach, grow, method, paint, photoshop, photography, color study, practice, color theory, colour theory, concept design, visual development, pixar artist

Id: 1d577v_XBKA

Length: 10min 44sec (644 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 07 2022