Am I overthinking this?

huevaluechroma

>>2920183
just copy real life, the best teacher of color

>>2920185
I can copy real life, but I'm talking about when rendering from imagination.

Let's say I have a character and their skin is red.

How do I determine the rest of the values of reds to use for the darker parts and lighter parts of the characters skin?

Do I just say "well that red looks dark enough" and mix it in until I get something that satisfies me or what?

Is that really it??

>>2920189
All color is relative. There is no mathematical formula to get the right values, because each hue has its own chroma range (a light blue can still be darker than a deep yellow). You have to think in terms of color temperature. I'd recommend reading "Alla Prima" if you haven't already.

>>2920192
Ah, I haven't gotten to that one yet

Will do then! Thank you for the info anon!

I struggled with the same problem for years. I could render in black and white, but not colour. This advice helped me move past that. I stripped my pallete back to three colours - lemon yellow, vermillion and Prussian blue.

The thing about these primaries is you can make thousands of colours from them just by mixing them. In the case of rendering a red. Squeeze the red out but also mix a green with the two remaining colours. The red might be too intense and bright so add a bit of that green. You will find by adding a bit of green the intensity diminishes and the red darkens.

If you're wanting the same results with blue, mix orange. And for yellow, mix purple. These are the complimentary colours, as in they are on opposite sides of that colour wheel. When mixed, the darken each other.

To get a very dark tone mix the blue with a bit of a smaller bit of red and maybe add a bit of green, that you made from the yellow and blue. You can make a colour that is essentially black. But this black, unlike black from a tube, gives a subtle graduation to the colour you wish to darken because it is made from the colours that are brighter in your painting. Tube black has a way of deadening colour when you tone it down.

Having a pallete of three colours means you can't go wrong because all the colours that you mix will relate, as they all come from the same three primaries.

For making a colour lighter, or tinting, just add white or wash it lightly if you are working on a white surface.

Good luck!

And just add a bit more, you can also make an amazing range of browns using oranges and greens. You'll find you have a total control over your pallete this way.

I remember buying every tube of painter. Under the sun. It's unbelievably confusing!

The technical term for reducing the intensity of a colour through mixing the colour opposite on the colour wheel is called adjusting the "chroma" if you want to research it more.

File: 2000px-MunsellColorWheel.svg.png (332KB, 2000x2000px) Image search: [Google]

332KB, 2000x2000px

>>2921723
This anon got it, doesn't matter if on purpose or just randomly.

When you mix colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel you're bringing them closer to the neutral grey. So if you want to darken or mute the color, you do not ever mix a tube black into it, but the color that will bring it closer to the neutral.

I recommend making your own color wheel out of 3 primaries and then a smaller outer wheel with these color + white, so you could see some darker shades.

Keep in mind that depending on your pigments you may not get some colors very vivid, like purple, but doing this will also help you determine what color you absolutely need from the tube and what color you can mix.

i'd also recommend doing color swatches, but it's a lot of effort and optimally, you need to repeat them later to correct the mistakes that you've made. Some people might find it boring as hell, i found it almost meditative, so it depends on the person you are.

In the end, the thing that matter is your ability to look at the exercise and seeing what you did wrong.

>>2920183
Practice with smaller, limited color pallettes. Work with dark brown, white and red. Now instead of working with 2 color inputs, you're working with 3.

With black and white, you can only use:
>black
>black and whites (greys)
>whites

With dark brown, red and white, you can utilize:
>dark brown
>white + dark brown
>red + dark brown
>white
>white + red
>red

What you'll need to learn with this exercise is that colors just add another dimension on top of values, which are the most important fundamental skill to have. The more colors you're working with, the more mixtures you'll be able to make, but the combinations are still separated into darks, midtones and lights (like a greyscale is).

If you wanted to go further, you could list all the color combinations you could come up with using dark brown, red, white & yellow, and categorize each combination into darks, midtones and lights.

Hope that helps!

>>2921723
>For making a colour lighter, or tinting, just add white

Bad advice, don't do that. Use yellow instead and mix with small amount of red or blue to get back on track. Adding white isn't a good practice unless you really have to in few cases.