BI_CLOPS ROUGH SKETCH

Before I do a painting, I like to work out the colors ahead of time. I didn't do this in the beginning and my success rate was about 50/50. When things turned out good it was accidental. Even though it seems like double the work, it saves me lots of headaches and frustrations in the future.

This is a rough pencil sketch I scanned and quickly colored in a photo-manipulatin' program. These colors are all on different layers so I can alter the HUE, SATURATION, and BRIGHTNESS with the slider tools until find a set of colors I'm happy with.


I guess most people may already know this, but if anyone doesn't:

HUE = which color. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, or purple?
SATURATION = the range between gray-scale and full color
BRIGHTNESS = how dark or light

When I have each color on a separate layer, I can start by making everything the same color. Or I don't have to. It doesn't really matter which color I start with since they all get manipulated anyway. With those 3 sliders you can get literally any color in the world.

When I do the actual painting I know my paints won't be able to exactly immitate the glowingly radiant brightness of computer monitor colors, but it gets me going in the right direction. It takes out all the guess work and mistake cover-upping.

You can rarely go wrong by intentionally altering colors in an unnatural way to achieve a color scheme. Even though skin isn't purple in real life it looks better being purple for this particular color scheme. There's some deeper color scheme info HERE.