How I Paint a Color Study

    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.