How did the artist get this to look like this?

[Painted Lattice 131]

 

See how their skin looks natural? The colors look warm... like actual skintone, not sky blue and violet like my eyedropper is telling me.

 

 

I can't seem to figure out how the artist accomplished this! Does anyone have a clue? Any tutorials on how to achieve this?

[MLPForums Phanact 1,374]

I would assume that they painted it in the natural skin colour and then the blue colour is something that has been overlayed or screened onto the image giving it the blue lighting effect.

[Painted Lattice 131]

 

Here I attempted to use an overlaying on top of a natural skintone and it seems to have helped it a little.

 

I feel like there's some sort of color-theory illusion technique they're using that I'm not able to figure out though?

 

edit: Thanks for the help, it did change the effect some. But yeah, I still feel like there's more to it.

Edited March 5, 2014 by Painted Lattice

[MLPForums Phanact 1,374]

There probably is some colouring technique that I'm not aware of as I'm more of a graphic designer rather than an actual artist.

 

All I can advise is to keep playing with overlays and screening and try modifying the Fill Opacity of the overlay/screen layer so that it is quite low.

[NeverPony 274]

I can't seem to figure out how the artist accomplished this! Does anyone have a clue? Any tutorials on how to achieve this?

 

The reason your version looks unnatural is because skin consists of more than two tones. It is not uncommon to have upwards of 15 different tones; of course, this can be simplified for more cartoon-like images.

 

I actually have very little experience with raster programs, but I gave it a shot anyway.

I only used 5 tones (base, 2 shadows, highlight, warmth).

 

 

Then I fiddled with the colors to make it blue/dark.

 

 

My colors aren't really blended, but you probably get the idea.

[Painted Lattice 131]

Ooh... so that's really all it is?

 

Thanks so much, guys. I'll be employing this technique quite a bit. I think it's pretty stunning.

[Castle Bleck 19,375]

It's the equivalent of looking at someone through blue-lensed glasses.

Edited March 7, 2014 by Anti-Villain

[Fhaolan 4,484]

I'm not going to say I'm an artist, but there's a trick my uncle who is taught me that might help. It's actually easier to do this now than what he actually did, because we were dealing with non-digital artwork way back when.

 

When I look at the original picture, all of the skin tone, despite being bluish tinge, is surrounded by relatively large sections of red, or reddish brown. If you look at your color sample sketches, and unfocus your eyes, you've got a lot more blue than red. If you look at the original picture the same way, the proportions are more even, and that blue is broken into smaller chunks by swaths of red. Your eyes may be 'bleeding' the color from the red areas into the skin tones making it appear more natural than it actually is.

 

To see if that is the thing, take a copy of the original picture and use your paint program to swash over the red and brown areas with a neutral gray and see if your impression of the skin tone changes.

 

Also the background color is a bright blue-white, and the highlights give the impression that the light source is *behind* the characters, the brain may be processing that and adjusting the skin tones appropriately because it's interpreting the characters to be in cool shadow. Try that same trick of painting over the bright white/blue background as see if it's appearance changes.

[SasQ 1,376]

See how their skin looks natural? The colors look warm... like actual skintone, not sky blue and violet like my eyedropper is telling me.

I can't seem to figure out how the artist accomplished this! Does anyone have a clue? Any tutorials on how to achieve this?

 

This is a trick our eyes do with colors and brightness. We don't perceive absolute values of color, but relative to surrounding colors. Thanks to that our eyes can easily accommodate to different lighting conditions and adjust our perception of color to compensate for the different lighting.

 

The easiest way to see this effect is by using brightness contrast. For example, try to guess which one of the little gray squares is brighter on the picture below:

 

 

The correct answer is: they're the same. You can check it yourself with your color picker. But when you see the little square on a darker background, it will appear brighter to you than when it appears on a brighter background. This is called "brightness contrast".

 

The same works with colors. For example, when you put two identical squares of 50% saturation on two different color background, one with 33% saturation, the other with 66% saturation, the square will appear more saturated on less saturated background, and less saturated on more saturated background. This is called the "saturation contrast". See an example below:

 

 

This works for color "temperature" too: When you surround a warm-colored spot with another warm color, it won't look so warm than when you surround it with colder color. This is the "temperature contrast". Here's an example of it:

 

 

Sometimes all those effect can be used together.

 

Back to your image:

The author used the same trick to make the bluish skin color appear warm, by surrounding it with colder tones of blue. Your eyes think that they look at something in a bluish environment, so they try to adjust the perception of other shades of blue to compensate for the blue lighting, and figure out the "true" colors no matter their bluish tint. So if they see a shade of blue which is warmer in comparison to other shade of blue, they think the original color was more reddish, and perceive it so.

 

Here's an example of skin colors taken from your picture:

 

 

I used a gradient of two extremes of skin colors, both are quite bluish. When they're on a cold blue background, as in the original picture (I picked the blue from there), those skin tones appear warmer. But when I changed the background color to something warm, like a lighting condition during the sunset, the same skin colors appear cold blue, as some metal piece of robot, because then your eyes try to interpret them as if their original color were colder than their surrounding.

Edited March 7, 2014 by SasQ

[Painted Lattice 131]

Fhao - thanks a bunch!

 

And SasQ... wah, I love you. I'm going to save a picture of your post and keep it around as a reference.

[SasQ 1,376]

I'd add that there's one more trick used by Impressionists:

Objects in shadow, when observed in natural lighting, usually aren't just darker (more black used). They also appear bluish, because they receive the blue cast from the ambient sky color. This is especially visible at twilight, when the sun is already behind the horizon. Everything looks bluish then. Even the white snow.

So when you add some blue for the colors of shaded objects, they will appear as if they were viewed in the open air.

 

Artificial light usually adds more yellow tint to the color. But this is the case only for incandescent light (light bulbs, fire, candles). With glow light, it's usually very cold blue, more in the violet part of the spectrum.

 

You can use these effects to simulate different lighting conditions.