Holy Shiiit I Just Found Your Blog And I Adore The Way You Use Color! I Work With Digital Art A Lot,

Holy shiiit I just found your blog and I adore the way you use color! I work with digital art a lot, and that's definitely the thing I struggle with the most. Bringing color into my lines and playing with different colors with shading has really been a challenge. Any tips??

thank you very much! color is actually something i have a really difficult time with, but i guess i’m not doing as badly as i thought? tbh, i use the same color palettes over and over again in my drawings, i just try to use them differently each time and hope that nobody notices…

my rule of thumb for choosing a color for lines, is that it has to be a darker value and it can’t clash with any of your other colors.

here you can see that having lines that are too light, or contrast too much with it’s surrounding colors looks really bad, and is frankly difficult to look at!

shading is also pretty difficult, but whatever you do, don’t take the color you’re shading, and just make it darker! you want to move either warmer or cooler to keep your colors from looking too flat.

(sorry if you already know this, but some people make this mistake!)

also, when in doubt, make your shadows cool! if you’re still not sure what colors to choose, just take a blueish grey, and slap it on top on a multiply layer.

if you don’t know how to make a certain color cooler, doing this basically does the hard work for you! once you get an idea of how to transition colors warmer and cooler, choosing your own without having to use the multiply layer gets easier. 

when adding more colors into my lines, usually i just choose a color that’s darker than the region i’m coloring. i think it looks weird if the lines clash too much with the colors underneath, so i try to choose a line color that looks good over the flats, and the toned shadows.

i keep the original lineart color wherever i want to separate parts of the drawing. coloring only the inside of the hair separates it from the skin. keeping the original lineart color underneath the neck and where the back ear is, helps separate them from the rest of the skin, and breaks up it all up. how much you color or don’t color, can flatten or add depth to your drawing. 

sorry this ended up being so long, but i hope i was able to help you even a little bit!