True Colors

In an illustration, color is as important as shapes, it also displays emotions. Historically artists have always searched for colors to diversify their palette. From natural pigments to Pantone’s catalog, a lot of work has been done! How to manage the huge amount of colors combinations available nowadays in digital painting? 

Once a client validates a sketch, the artist begins coloring. Adding something else than white, black and grey is decisive in the final impression. Many emotions are displayed in a drawing through composition, lighting and color. Indeed, the last one sets the mood: yellow usually means optimism, red is associated with strength or love, blue with power and trust… Careful, if you go to China for example, white won’t mean purity as in western countries, but mourning! As an artist, if you work with foreign clients, it can be useful to look at their traditions before getting started.  

How do we name colors? Is there a worldwide standard to describe that? The selection of basic colors in English contains yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, red, orange, brown, black, gray and white, but it differs between 3 and 12 from a language to another. Each culture treats what we see in its own way, for example the word “blue” doesn’t exist everywhere and can be depicted with nature’s vocabulary. Researchers published The World Color Survey in 1969, where they show a common basis in color naming after studying 2600 speakers from 110 unwritten languages: “dark” “light” and “red.” How come colors evolve the same way across the world? To know more, we invite you to watch the following video from the magazine Vox:

In practice, the use of a traditional color wheel helps build consistency in your drawing. The three primary colors are red, blue and yellow. When you blend them two by two, you get the three secondary colors: green, orange and purple. There are six other tertiary ones.

Thanks to those 12 hues gathered in 1 circle, you can think about many combinations to create either contrast or harmony. In the first case, you should use 2 complementary colors and in the second, 2 analogous ones. Choosing 3 or 4 hues, you set up a hierarchy between them to accentuate something in your drawing, each color shouldn’t be used in the same proportions! Your ease in mixing colors shows your ability to manage your subject and to give a real strength to your painting.

A last thing we should keep in mind is, if you paint with a sky blue, it won’t appear all the same on different screens depending on their resolution and brightness. When you print, according to the paper’s thickness and inks used the result will also differ. Changing the medium (or screen) while painting can avoid some disappointment when you are finished!