lean scarab
hey, i am jashu and i was just trying to do some practice for the color theory which looks like i did fairly ok, the thing thats bugging me the most is the color of the sea, i want it to be more cool? but not entirely blue, same goes with the highloghts which feel fairly underwhelming, any type of adivce will be great, thanks!
soft gate
It's mostly about how colours and values relate to each other. If you have a neutral grey surrounded by red, it looks cool but it the same grey is surrounded by blue, it looks warm instead. Same goes for values, if you feel like a certain highlight os underwhelming/ doesn't stand out enough then make the area around it darker
Meaning, if you have a orange colour and want to make the shadow look more cool, you don't need to draw it as a dark blue, but you can just slide the hue a bit towards the cooler colours (blue) and adjust the values accordingly.
lean scarab
@soft gate THANKS FOR THE ADVICE! i actually just now tried some stuff with blending modes and tried to get the mood and the atmosphere stand out more, can u give me some more advice on how to make this better? if thats not too much of a hastle
i think i made it better and now i feel the lighting pop more with the contrast although i feel the blues are all gone now
soft gate
Alright so originally I wanted to advise you to try to use a wider range of hues since I felt like you often see those orange to purple-blue hues when looking at the sunset like this
But then I did a bit of digging since I wondered why sometimes the sunset just appeared to have a range from orange to blue-greyish colours while the sun was at the same level as the other sunsets with the range from orange to purple and I found out it depends on the air condition. So did you use a reference? If you have you can send me that and I can look if there is anything you can improve on
soft gate
<@1080142482685317210> THANKS FOR THE ADVICE! i actually just now tried some stu...
Also this really looks a lot better already
lean scarab
I didn't really pay attention to the reference much as I wanted to keep the colors in mind and paint how I feel it is? Is that a practice method? I heard it from somewhere so I did that, i can see a lot of stuff different from the ref, mainly the blue and water, stones also look terrible
lean scarab
Also this really looks a lot better already<:catthumbsup:1056787241738960930>
thanks! i do think i made the art better but i still feel there is more i could do with it
but i never am able to put the finger on what and end uo not continuing the art anymore
soft gate
I didn't really pay attention to the reference much as I wanted to keep the colo...
It's definitely not a bad exercise to paint a bit more freely but I still would recommend just trying to replicate a reference and understand the colour relation, even doing that one or two times can help you understand so much if you do it right.
(Tbh I have been running away from doing a proper background study as well, but I did do similar studies so I can at least tell from that experience. Coaches don't play)
soft gate
but i never am able to put the finger on what and end uo not continuing the art ...
And that's exactly why trying to replicate a reference helps you out a ton there because you can spot mistakes a lot easier all by yourself when you have the reference
lean scarab
thanks so much for the reply, this advice was actually one of the most important advice ive heard in a long time, usually teachers too in my college say to use your own imagination which makes me contemplate to myself and end up not even doing it
would it be better to use gradient maps to normally paint over as i heard others do a lot, or would it be better to go off by my own thinking from the get go?
soft gate
I mean these are different processes on how to make an illustration. There is not right or wrong way on doing that, digital art just gives you a ton of possibilities, layer modes, normal painting and gradient maps being the big ones. I would just recommend that you all try them and see what works best for you/ what you like the most and you can also combine them
If you want to do a study to understand colouring better then I would recommend just painting normally, you can also use multiple layers but maybe not layer modes since they might take away the understanding of why kayer modes even work that well
lean scarab
the thing is i just started using photoshop after medibang paint pro turned into a paid software, the shift is def pretty weird? since now im introduced to gradient maps, i started painting and i think the painting above is one of my better ones, plus our college doesnt teach digital till the end of the first year, but I will be practicing further and put out more works in critique n help thingy to improve by myself so thanks again!
soft gate
Oh and also I want to give you one more general tip if it helps: it's good to have multiple sources of information
What I mean by that is that while your art teachers can give you good tips, even they are obviously not perfect and I don't exactly know how art school works but they probably just have a general curriculum for everyone so it's not especially personalized
So that's why yt and other free art sources are so great since in one side they offer you industry professionals who give great tips and on the kther side there's a large variety of art teachers so it is personalised and you get a lot of different viewpoints and workflows
So if you watch more artists than one, you'll eventually see things where they all emphasize on, where they are different and you'll even see some videos criticise a topic that many other videos advise you to follow and having that wide range of opinions can help you shape your own instead of just following one or two
But alright, that's enough yap, good luck