Working With Colours (Can Be a Pain)

Hi again!

This time I want to talk about colour (which I still spell like this because color just looks wrong to me). Most pieces of art rely on how colours work together. When starting an art project, choosing the predominant colour or colours is one of the first things to do. I like to call this a colour scheme (although you could just as easily call it a 'palette'). Some artists dread colour schemes, others rely on them. It can be a good tool if you use it right, but it can also stress you out if you dwell on it too much.

When I started painting miniatures, I used colours pretty randomly, mismatching themes and ideas willy-nilly. This was actually a really good thing to start out with, because it forced me down the path of analysing and seeing first-hand which colours worked together and which ones didn't. So, the easiest first step to take when designing a colour scheme is to jot down the colours you want to use on a piece of paper or a palette, and see how they work with each other. If you don't like it, change things around until you do. There's nothing more frustrating than painting something and realising you should have used different tones and/or colours when it's already finished. Preparation is key.

Another really handy tool to use is a colour wheel. You've probably seen tons of them (I know I have). If you're not up to making one yourself with your paints, you can easily find one online. Personally, I find this one the most useful, as it has a few options you can toy around with. I'll leave an example from that website into each segment.

And, well, might as well put a disclaimer in here. I am not a schooled artist. I don't have a great understanding of colour theory, just all the little things I've picked up along the way. The most important advice is to have fun while you experiment! Listen to your favourite music, take pictures of your work, take a break every once in a while.

Monochrome Melancholy

Example

While not in itself a full-on colour scheme, monochromatic pieces of art deserve a mention. You basically limit yourself to just one colour, and use light/dark contrast to complete the piece. Using a monochromatic palette is very impactful, and creates a washed-out, dreary look to almost everything. Painting in monochrome is a fun experiment and a good exercise. You can also use monochrome as the basis for highlighting a specific element in your piece of art (think along the lines of Sin City)

Opposites Attract

Example

One of the easiest colour schemes to use is just take any colour, and seeing what its opposite (/complementary) is on the colour wheel. For example let's say you want to paint a jungle with loads of different greens all over, and you want the background sky to contrast all the greenery. You look at the colour wheel, see that green and red are opposites, and paint the sky with reddish tones, and add a bunch of vibrant red flowers in the foliage to "pop". Good job!

You can also see this in play with movies. The most obvious opposite contrast that we see in movies these days is blue and orange. A night scene around a bonfire with closeups of characters' faces is almost a trope at this point, with one side of the face in dark, blue tones, and the other side blasted with fiery oranges and yellows from a fire/lantern/headlight or anything else orange-ish. Take note of this choice of contrasting colours when walking past the movie aisle in your local supermarket, most of the movies' covers use this clever contrast trick to draw your eye in.

Adjacent Affiliates

Example

Adjacent colours work together as well. Think of a painting of a glacier, or a photo taken underwater in a lagoon. When the overall light situation is tinted towards a specific colour, adjacency is your friend. A fantasy painting of a volcanic magma temple uses almost exclusively reds, oranges, and yellows as the colour scheme. Adjacency brings consistence when you want to drive a certain mood throughout the whole piece you're doing. It can also be used together with other methods of choosing a colour scheme.

For example, let's say you want to paint David and Goliath and make the two characters really stand out. You decide that David should be predominantly blue, and that the Goliath should be orange, as they are opposite on the colour wheel and you get a real sense of adversaries from that dynamic. Great! Then you start thinking that if David wears nothing but blue, and Goliath just has an orange loincloth, you haven't really gotten your point of two drastically different characters across. The solution? Adjacency!

So you take David and give him a blue and green tunic, a turquoise headband and a slightly purple, yet still blue sling. Now you've created a rich and dynamic character while maintaining the "cold" colour theme. Then you give the Goliath an orange loincloth with red stripes and a yellow sun motif, a golden wristband, splatter some blood/mud all over his club and legs, and top it all off with a bright-red nose, creating a formidable yet consistent adversary for David to combat.

Thinking Like a Triad

Example

Let's get a bit more advanced. Triads are colour schemes that implement three main colours. One of them acts as the most prominent one, while the other two are equal complementary elements to that original colour of choice. Sounds difficult, right? Well, that link I shared at the start is really handy with triads. Simply look at the different options above the colour wheel, and choose the one with three dots distributed equally on a circle. You can alter the distance of the two complementary colours (in degrees, the default angle is 30° from each other), as well as change the specific hue from the center of the colour wheel. 

Triads can dictate the entire colour palette you're using, or act just as a guideline to see which colours work best with the ones you've already chosen. A triad colour scheme is a solid foundation for anything, and is especially useful when you want to tie a bunch of different characters together thematically (like a sports team or a unit of soldiers).

Neon Tetrad

Example

Tetrads work a lot like triads, but they consist of two pairs of complementary colours. A tetrad is just as useful as a triad, just a bit beefier. I find this choice of colour scheme most useful when you want to design something chaotic and striking, like a poisonous worm or a busy shantytown.

Concluding banter

Wow, that got a bit technical at points, hope I didn't confuse you! The one thing you should keep in mind when picking out colours for your work is to have fun with it! If you get too worried about exact tones, hues, and colours, you might not finish your work (happens to me regularly, if it's not perfect from start to finish, it's scrapped). I would add in some more examples of good and bad colour schemes here at the end, but alas, I don't have any of my equipment with me, and I'm writing this at a friend's place. Very likely that I'll come back to this later on and edit in some pics :)

Hope you enjoyed this small intro to colour theory, and hopefully you learned something new! I've had a half-year hiatus (if you even noticed!), but that's mostly because I don't have my desk set up, and most of my supplies are in boxes in a storage closet. But that's going to change sometime soonish (fingers crossed!), I just came in here to see how things were going, and noticed that I've had this piece of writing unfinished for quite a while.

Catch you later (oh, and a pleasant Midsummer to all, I'm always baffled when the Sun just doesn't set for days. A good time to go out and see the world awash in light and colour),

~Vel