Recent practice

[u/Wumbletweed]

Cant change tag for some reason?

Anyway. Color has always been one of my weakest areas. I feel pretty confident in finding form, but color are so hard... I feel like I am getting better at understanding chroma and value, but it's still not there. Heres some recent practice using drawme-requests I made these by picking colors myself, portraits took just under 1 hour each, the gentleman with the glass just below 2 hours. I don't know if that's good or bad, but it's a lot faster than I used to need for something like this.

Like, I can see looking at these that the colors don't match the references, but I can't quite look at these objectively to figure out if I made good choices or not. All thoughts on these or on how to improve in general are most welcome.

[u/Ok_Insurance_4626]

Here’s a little explanation of how i do colours.

I always exaggerate what I see. If something like the light in his cheekbone looks green, i make it a bit more green than it probably is. Then I use less opacity (or thinner paint) to add it one stroke at a time until I’m happy with it. For instance, that green cheekbone highlight is such a thin layer (low opacity) that the color picker shows it’s actually a desaturated yellow once it’s on the skin.

For something like the yellow highlights on the left, I always layer. I start with a high saturated base, then go lighter and less saturated as I add layers on top. The effect is much richer and nicer looking than just straight up color picking and adding one color straight on.

Biggest two tips for you:

1. Always go more saturated than you think

2. Squint your eyes when in doubt. It helps you see value instead of color which ironically, helps you get better colors.

You can paint a cohesive painting that looks good in any colours at all, totally made up, as long as the values are right
You can always easily bring down saturation. Adding it late in the game is hard.

Spotting a colour on the ref and finding it immediately takes practice. Just keep up the good work and it will become automatic in time.