zettanoia:

Hello!! Thank you so much!! ‘v’ I’m no expert at picking colors but I’ll try my best to explain some of my thought process.

For me, one of the most important parts is establishing the color and lighting in a scene before I even think about picking colors for the characters ^^ I find it much easier to pick colors for a character once I already have some kind of background color or scene since it means I just need to grab colors that look like they “fit in” that scene, instead of taking a wild guess.

It’s really important to me that I maintain a cohesive feeling in the piece, and this is easiest to do when I do that from the very start. It’s up to you how you want to do this (if you want to do this at all!) – for me, I have a tendency to choose initial colors that are more desaturated so they don’t clash too much. As I move forward in the piece, I’ll end up adding more saturated and contrasting colors.

A lot of these colors seem wayyy different from what the “actual” color of something is. It’s important to understand this distinction! Just because a particular color is, e.g. dark and desaturated by itself, doesn’t mean it will necessarily appear that way when presented against other dark and desaturated colors. Relative color is pretty amazing!

One last thing I like to do when I’m doing lights or shadows for a single object is that I won’t just pick colors that are simply lighter or darker – I’ll usually move along the color wheel and pick different hues as well. You can do like warm light / cool shadows, or cool light / warm shadows with this. This kind of contrast makes the piece a little more interesting to look at.

(i tend to default towards warm light / cool shadows by picking lighter colors of a hue closer to yellow, and darker colors of a hue closer to blue/purple. you should feel free to mix it up!!!)

Outside of all that, references are your friend! There’s a lot to be gained from photographs and other people’s artworks. I almost always throw together like 40 pictures to use as reference as I’m planning or painting something. So long as you’re not copying their color schemes exactly, don’t be afraid to use references!!

This ended up being quite long, but I hope this could be somewhat helpful! Good luck anon!!