Color Schemes & Palettes
September 8th, 2006Color Schemes & Palettes
Many artists are afraid of incorporating color into their work. The key is to plan out your colors before you even touch your “digital brush”. This tutorial will teach you the basic color schemes and will give you some additional tips on how to build an interesting color palette.This tutorial builds on Color Theory Basics written by Zeroe earlier this week, so you might want to read that one first before launching into color schemes.
“Color in a picture is like enthusiasm in life.”
-Vincent Van Gogh
Basic Color Schemes
This color scheme consists of one color and black & white.
There are two types of monochromatic color schemes, high contrast values and full range values. The high contrast value one just uses one color. This color schemes are very good for drawing attention to a particular area of your piece.
One that is most popular is a full intensity red, which is used in advertisement and film a lot because it offers a great contrast to black.
The other type is full range values where you select a color and use any additional value of it.
A pair of two opposite colors on the color wheel.
This is a dynamic scheme that offers a nice contrast and tension.
To make it a little bit more interesting you can use the color right next to the complementing color. Some primary examples are yellow and purple red and green or secondary opposites yellow-orange and blue purple.
An analogues color scheme builds from colors that are adjacent colors on the color wheel. It is one with the most harmony because the colors are right next to each other. If you use up to four adjacent colors the scheme stays bright, if you use more than four it moves towards a complementary relationship and the mixtures darken.
An example:Red, red-organge, orange, orange-yellow, yellow and valueAnother one would be:
Yellow, yellow-green, green, blue-green and value (see example below)
This scheme can be described as energizing and creating some heat. Warm colors are very active and grab attention. A typical warm color scheme includes red, orange, yellow-orange, yellow and values.
I did a quick painting for the cool and warm scheme with the same line drawing. See how different the mood is on this one. I added some touches of yellow to light up the inside of the castle. Next to being a cool color scheme it also is a complementary color scheme (purple and yellow). The yellow looks very dramatic because it is a color with a warm temperature contrasting a color with a cool temperature.
This scheme can be described as quiet and soothing. A typical cool color scheme would be yellow-green, green, blue-green, blue-purple and values.
This was just an introduction to the basic color schemes. If you are interested in experimenting with others models, try some of the following:
- Split Complementary - find a complementary color and then use the colors left or right from it. If yellow is your main color the complement would be purple and the split complementary colors would be purple-red and purple-blue.
- Analogous Complementary - three analogous colors and a complement of one of the three.
- Basic Triad - three colors that lie inside a triangle on the color wheel. The most basic one would be red, blue and yellow on a subtractive color scheme and red green and blue on an additive scheme. The triangle can be moved any way on the wheel. It can provide provocative mixtures.
- Complementary & Modified Triad - Any two complementary colors plus an additional color half way in between on either side. This scheme is close to being analogous but skips one color in between.
- Double - Complementary Tetradic Color Schemes - two complementary color pairs arranged in a rectangle on the color wheel. It can be any pair of complements forming a rectangle that can expand as far as being a square.
- Achromatic Scheme - very unsaturated colors
- Nuance Scheme - colors that have the same saturation and lightness
- Neutral vs. High Intensity - using soft neutral colors with bright ones
Tips for building your palette
“Before, when I didn’t know what color to put down, I put down black. Black is a force: I depend on black to simplify the construction. Now I’ve given up blacks.” - Henri Matisse, 1946.
Types of Palettes
To build a color palette you only need three colors. A color palette is mostly referred to as the circle of mixtures from those three colors. The most basic color palette consists of primary colors red, yellow and blue. The palette of the old masters for examples used to be Burnt Sienna, Yellow Ochre and Payne’s Gray. (see image below)
Another palette could just consist of earth tones, of delicate colors, of soft colors endless possibilities.
Not using Black and White
In impressionism most painters did not use black and white at all, completely abandoning it from their color palette. They found that every shadow still has some amount of color in it and the same applies to highlights. Instead of using black for your shadows you can use dark purples and blues. This will add a vibrancy and different energy to your painting.
Simplicity
Choose your colors wisely and keep your palette as tight as you can. Most beginning painters struggle with that and throw in more and more colors till they finally realize I screwed it up.
Safe Palettes
Put your palettes on a separate sheet of paper or separate file on the computer. You will find yourself using the once that you like again and again.
Symbolism and Appeal
Children generally prefer brighter, happier, flashier palettes. Men in most cultures prefer cooler colors whereas women like warmer colors better.
Cultures around the world have different responses to color and the symbolism might be quite different so you might want to do some research if you have a particular target audience in mind. In the west white is seen as a positive color that is used for weddings. In some parts of Asia white is the color of death and mourning and red is the color of marriage instead.
Inspiration
If you can’t make up your mind on what palette would be fitting for your piece, just look at some artwork that you like and get inspired. It is fairly easy to steal a color palette from your favorite painter. When you find a piece whose palette you want to use - just open it in Photoshop and sample the main colors. Be aware that there will be a lot of shades, tints and mixes so try to look for the purest colors contained in the images.
Many painters before have struggled before in the quest to understand color. It can be quite fascinating and helpful to study the works of the fathers of painting.
Here a few master painters that are worth studying a bit:
Claude Monet, Marc Chagall, Paul Cezanne, Vincent Van Gogh,
Pierre Auguste Renoir, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Rafael, Leonardo
Da Vinci
A new generation of artists paints almost exclusively with image editing programs
such as Painter and Photoshop. I provided some links below for inspiration and getting some ideas for your color palette.
Digital Master Painters:
Craig Mullen
http://www.goodbrush.com/
Jason Chan
http://www.jasonchanart.com/
Goro Fujita
http://www.area-56.de/gyararii/index.php
Linda Bergkvist
http://www.furiae.com/index.php?view=gallery
http://enayla.cgsociety.org/gallery/216037/
Christian-Lorenz Scheurer
http://www.christianlorenzscheurer.com/
Trust your Intuition
Color schemes are not an exact science but a useful framework to build upon. Have fun, experiment, explore and find the colors that speak to you.
- Ingmar Zahorsky
All Images used in this article are the property of Ingmar Zahorsky
http://www.zahorskyart.com/
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