General rules for picking environment shades/palettes
polycounter lvl 11
I cant for the life of me figure out what colors work together and what colors don't in an environment. Whats quick rules of thumb to make sure the dirt doesnt clash with the grass, or the trees look like they dont belong there?
All my scenes look like grass from Canada, trees from Britain, dirt from Australia, brick from some castle in Germany
My biggest problem is just figuring out what colors work together. Im decent at painting skin clothing and metals, but environments I just do not get and cannot find any resources on picking palettes. Im good at picking lights/darks without them looking washed out or unsaturated because ive read the art_tut over 5 times and analyzed alot of other peoples concept art, but my issue is still with environments
I can't lay down the concept colors because obviously I suck at picking them
How do you guys pick color schemes that work? real images? photoshop blur tricks to get average colors from real photos? what?
All my scenes look like grass from Canada, trees from Britain, dirt from Australia, brick from some castle in Germany
My biggest problem is just figuring out what colors work together. Im decent at painting skin clothing and metals, but environments I just do not get and cannot find any resources on picking palettes. Im good at picking lights/darks without them looking washed out or unsaturated because ive read the art_tut over 5 times and analyzed alot of other peoples concept art, but my issue is still with environments
I can't lay down the concept colors because obviously I suck at picking them
How do you guys pick color schemes that work? real images? photoshop blur tricks to get average colors from real photos? what?
Replies
it's really hard to tell what you mean by > All my scenes look like grass from Canada, trees from Britain, dirt from Australia, brick from some castle in Germany
without seeing an example. I can hardly understand what your problem is to be honest.
Another thing you should observe really carefully in environments is scale and global lighting/tones. chances are you're struggling with those, and thus color looks weak/off by proxy.
ideally I'd suggest buying a small watercolor or gouache set and doing a few real paintings, so you can see how it's possible to start with broad strokes and limited palette, and expand/detail those later.
http://www.colourlovers.com/palettes/most-loved/all-time/meta?page=1
ALOT of a scenes colour will come from the lighting too, getting this to work with the diffuse (concept i know but same errr concept) and choosing both to work together can make or break a scene... you can also use the lighting in any scene to compliment or force a scene to work, too many colours in a scene, try pushing strong coloured or dimmer lighting to bring all those disparate elements closer together in palette.
If i want to figure out a palatte for lighting what i like to do is get a refernce that i like (a picture of a welsh castle for random example) duplicate the layer in PS blur it and choose (colour pick) some base colours, two for the sky, two for the grass/greenery... two for each main element... then i hide that layer and using the original pick some nice highlights/lowlights for each element...
i do this for lighting work but it works just great for concepting too
Avoid this unless if your making a sewer.
frell: do studies. unified color comes through lighting.