Drawing In Colour~

[M.DerpyJane 14]

I've made a drawing related topic before, but this is something different..


Alright, well here's the thing..
I draw quite a bit, mainly traditional pencil drawings. They're decent I suppose. (That's beside the point.)

But the other day I worked on drawing in coloured pencil, and it didn't necessarily turn out how I would have liked..

I made the whole sketch in pencil, then went through and outlined in colour and then coloured things in, but I found it harder to detail and shade with colours. (Which I get crazy about in normal drawings I'm a big fan of detail.)

Anyways, I was wondering if there were any tips I could pick up when working with colours and all.
Ways I could improve.

 

Uhm, thanks for taking the time to read and/or reply!~ c: 

[Kay Dreamer 884]

@@M.DerpyJane, 

 

Playing with colour is my absolute favourite thing about making art, but it's also one of the most complex. It's an enooooooormous topic, which is impossible to cover completely in the space of one post, but I'll do my best to explain to you a few pointers, and link you through to one of my favourite tutorials on the topic.

 

The biggest thing separating colour from a greyscale piece is the fact that you have three things to consider rather than one. In a greyscale piece, the only thing you need to worry about when shading is...

Value: How dark or light each part is. This makes everything much easier, because you simply need to place the dark parts where the shadows would fall, and the light parts where the light source is hitting the subject.

 

When you begin to use colour, you add two more elements to this.

Hue: The actual colour you're using. Blue and red are both hues.

Saturation: How rich the colour is. The lesser the saturation, the more faded or 'grey' it looks. Certain pale pinks, for example, can be made with a de-saturated red.

 

As a general rule, you want to ensure you're not constantly choosing colours with very high levels of saturation, because they're extremely bright and don't blend well. A few saturated colours per piece are okay, but use them sparingly.

 

Choosing hue is a practiced art, as there are no hard and fast rules here. Green and red, which are on opposite sides of the colour wheel, can work just as well as green and blue, which are next to each other. Of course, it's much easier to use hues which are close to each other, though there is a very good trick for using ones which are further apart. This trick is to incorporate a third colour, somewhere in between the two contrasting ones, to 'link' them together. You could also adjust the saturation and value of the contrasting colours. For example, making one low in saturation and the other high in saturation, or one dark in value and the other light in value.

 

You also want to create a unified 'palette' of colours for each piece. A good way to practice this is to choose five pencils which you think go well together. Try colouring a piece using only these five pencils. Don't use any others! Select one of the pencils as a 'light source' colour and one of them as a 'shadow' colour, and shade the other three colours with these two pencils only. Using these two colours to shade every other colour in the piece helps make it look very unified.

 

As I said, there's a tutorial I link people to all the time for colour, because it has great illustrated examples of everything I've just said here. It's by Purplekeckleon, and you can find it here: http://stuff.veekun.com/pkcolor/

 

Good luck and happy colouring!

[M.DerpyJane 14]

@@M.DerpyJane, 

 

Playing with colour is my absolute favourite thing about making art, but it's also one of the most complex. It's an enooooooormous topic, which is impossible to cover completely in the space of one post, but I'll do my best to explain to you a few pointers, and link you through to one of my favourite tutorials on the topic.

 

The biggest thing separating colour from a greyscale piece is the fact that you have three things to consider rather than one. In a greyscale piece, the only thing you need to worry about when shading is...

Value: How dark or light each part is. This makes everything much easier, because you simply need to place the dark parts where the shadows would fall, and the light parts where the light source is hitting the subject.

 

When you begin to use colour, you add two more elements to this.

Hue: The actual colour you're using. Blue and red are both hues.

Saturation: How rich the colour is. The lesser the saturation, the more faded or 'grey' it looks. Certain pale pinks, for example, can be made with a de-saturated red.

 

As a general rule, you want to ensure you're not constantly choosing colours with very high levels of saturation, because they're extremely bright and don't blend well. A few saturated colours per piece are okay, but use them sparingly.

 

Choosing hue is a practiced art, as there are no hard and fast rules here. Green and red, which are on opposite sides of the colour wheel, can work just as well as green and blue, which are next to each other. Of course, it's much easier to use hues which are close to each other, though there is a very good trick for using ones which are further apart. This trick is to incorporate a third colour, somewhere in between the two contrasting ones, to 'link' them together. You could also adjust the saturation and value of the contrasting colours. For example, making one low in saturation and the other high in saturation, or one dark in value and the other light in value.

 

You also want to create a unified 'palette' of colours for each piece. A good way to practice this is to choose five pencils which you think go well together. Try colouring a piece using only these five pencils. Don't use any others! Select one of the pencils as a 'light source' colour and one of them as a 'shadow' colour, and shade the other three colours with these two pencils only. Using these two colours to shade every other colour in the piece helps make it look very unified.

 

As I said, there's a tutorial I link people to all the time for colour, because it has great illustrated examples of everything I've just said here. It's by Purplekeckleon, and you can find it here: http://stuff.veekun.com/pkcolor/

 

Good luck and happy colouring!

Thank you, that helps a lot, I'll be sure to work more on that, I think I see where I can start improving already. (: