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How I Paint a Color Study

3/23/2015

I started a new project! I'll expand more on it in a future blog post, but the shorthand is I read a book called Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly. The book centers around a modern day American girl and a girl living during the French Revolution. I was so enamored of it that I decided to undertake a big design project to visualize the characters and the environments in the book. This picture is of the character Amadé Malherbeau's house. In order to breakdown my process even more, for this entry I'm focusing solely on color studies. First I start with a finished line drawing.

My crappy preliminary sketch. Rough sketches do not have to be beautiful to serve their purpose.

My line drawing is usually as close to final as I can get, with only a few construction lines remaining. It's important to fully visualize this before entering the coloring stage.

After I finish the line drawing (expect a future blog post discussing my process for draftsmanship), I fill the canvas with a gradient with the basic colors that I want for the scene. In this case, I knew outside was going to be dusk, so I made the gradient closer to the correct color for outside. The gradient helps me to see past the blank canvas and to better realize the color palette.

Whoohoo! Gradients!

Next, I fill in the flat colors for the different planes (walls, ceiling, floor). I use a high opacity brush and only lightly pay attention to lighting, as this stage comes later. So that I don't get overwhelmed by lighting, shadow, local color and color scheme, it really helps to break it down into simple steps to keep everything cohesive.

Planes of color.

After that, I fill in local color. (The color of something as perceived to be in daylight, uninfluenced by other sources). Now, local color changes with different lighting, so it's important that something that is red in daylight, still looks red in a dimly lit room. They will be far from the same color though. If it's hard to visualize what the color should look like, it helps to start with the daylight color, and adjust it from there. It's important that you choose the color from the color wheel, and not just paint over the local color with blue or another color to "mix" it. Photoshop is not oil paint, it doesn't mix well.
--> In this chart I showed what the daylight colors would look like for three of the hues in my painting.

Local Color.

Then I paint the sources of light, and the highlights that go with that. For this, I knew there would be a single candle lit on the table, a fire lit out of frame on the bottom right, and some light filtering in from the window.

Highlights and sources of light.

Lastly, I paint in the shadows. And that's it! I try to work in a bigger canvas than the picture frame, so that the painting stays loose and natural. It's easier to draw through and paint through this way. I usually only crop it for the final image (although I cropped the other versions for this post).

Shadows!

My color studies are usually fairly complete. Final color adjustments come at the end, but figuring out all the color and light play helps the final painting to go a lot faster and smoother.

My final piece.

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Artificial Light

3/8/2015

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My Roller Derby Gals hanging out at the club.

This is what the old characters looked like. Notice any resemblance?

My last set of pictures delved into the roller derby scene. I was dually inspired by old characters I had drawn in middle school, and going to the Moonlight Rollerway here in Los Angeles. In case you were wondering, the characters from middle school were very heavily influenced by a game called Jet Set Radio that I played on Dreamcast growing up. (Blast from the past, am I right?)
Anyway, the more I drew these characters, the less appealing they sounded to draw in an actual roller rink. I chose two other scenes that still had the roller rink feel that I loved so much: bright, artificial, neon lights. I did quite a bit of preliminary work before getting to painting.

So many preliminary sketches! It's important to figure things out here, so that your final image doesn't suffer from lack of planning.

I even went so far as to make formal model sheets and prop sheets to show their different outfits and shoes, and the menu of The Cheesy Burger, the local joint that the Gals frequent. Maybe I did too many sketches, but I think it really helped my final pieces go much more smoothly, so I have no regrets.

Model sheets for the Gals.

I work predominantly in natural light, so it was very refreshing and exciting to delve into artificial. One thing that is always important, but especially in paintings like these, is to consider where your light is coming from, and where it bounces. Since the sources of man-made lighting are usually much closer to the subject, the bounce factor is greater. Pay attention to parallel and perpendicular surfaces, they reflect the same light differently. It helps to do studies from life. If you don't have a model on hand, grab a mirror and a light, and get to work on self portrait studies. That's what I did!

My self portrait lighting studies. Each took about 15 minutes.

For my club scene, I knew shadows would be an important element, so I made sure to sketch out the forms they came from in order to accurately depict them. Even if you stray from your sketch, at least the foundation makes sense. You can only go up from there.

The process for my club scene. I turned on the "scattering" option on the Photoshop brush presets for these pieces and found it to blend easier.

After doing finalized line work, I did a fairly final color study, figuring out the local colors, shadows and bounce light. For me, it is very easy to muddy local color (the natural color of a thing as perceived in daylight i.e. red apple) by painting opaque highlights and shadows on top; it is very important to consciously select the local color and think through what is affecting it before settling. After finalizing all the painted elements, I added a layer of blurred glows, an opaque layer of additional shadow set to "Multiply" and a gradient overlay going from orange to indigo set to "Vivid Light" and brought down to about 20% opacity. I find these really help to unify the image into a completed piece.

The process for my diner piece.

The process for my diner painting was very similar, although I hid a few photo textures in this one. Overall, I think I succeeded in my studies of neon lights, and more to my surprise, I bettered my local color, a demon I have battled for a long time.

The final diner.

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How I Paint a Color Study

Artificial Light

Meghan Boehman Art

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