How do I stop my digital paintings from being muddy and what should I work on for my painting skills

Trill_Clinton

Hey guys so often my digital paintings particularly their values are described as being muddy. I want to rectify this but I have no clue as to what resources would be best to learn from. Does anyone here have a recommendation as to any sites or texts which cover understanding and improving ones use of value. I hope this isn't a stupid question to ask btw. I've just attached one of my paintings below just as an example of where I am basically at when it comes to digital painting Anyway thank you in advance.

chubbycat

James Gurney is always a name thrown around a lot in the artistic community; mainly for his book Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter, which is most definitely worth a read and a good place to start. Youtube has limited, but still good resources on colour and value. Anthony Jones is the king of values, so study his works for sure. His gumroad tutes are really helpful too, so pick a few of those up if you can. Hope that helps! I'm at the stage of reassessing my values and learning more about them too. I'll keep you posted if I stumble across any other good resources. 

Trill_Clinton

Thank you for the heads up and please do I find it always nice to work alongside people when improving/studying

chubbycat

No worries at all. Most definitely; especially something as complex as values and colour. I find stuff like that hard to wrap my head around.  

Alemja

I feel like your handling of color is pretty good, to me it looks like your painting is blurry because you aren't refining shapes. Reduce the size of your brush and start refining edges and the silhouette, you have a great start but because of either your brushes being too big or opacity being too low it's making everything look soft and blurry.

Here is what I did super quick color picking the colors you already have in your image:

Animated form:

You can see how small refinements make all the difference


Check out this page, it is very information dense about painting: https://androidarts.com/art_tut.htm

Best of luck!

lotet

your colors are looking pretty fine actually, maybe a bit desaturated, Ive seen way worse when comes to muddies. I say sharper brushes and/or maybe some lasso tool/masking would help. @Alemja is on point with that paintover, just go over your edges to clean up the silhouette and youl be fine I think.

If you havnt, check out this tutorial!  (scroll down some to get to the content).
its not focused on anything in particular, but covers pretty much everything you need to know to level up to that next step. 

EDIT: lol! realized that I linked the same tutorial as @Alemja did, I guess its just that awesome of a tutorial

Trill_Clinton

Sorry about the late reply once again I would like to thank you guys at the community for the help and support. This stuff has really helped me to grow as an artist and I really do appreciate you guys taking the time out to help someone out  

Julianimator

Hi there,

Muddy colours can be avoided if you pick colours diagonally instead of vertical/horizontally from the colour box(in Photoshop).
Previously I have done some directions on how to make colour appear to be more natural & non muddy, kindly see the attached:



To support this theory, you can do some test by open a photo in photoshop and pick the areas where it transition from light to dark.
Hope these helps.

miguelnarayan

I second the previous poster. This is the right way to pick colors and also the way color works in real life, if you color pick from a photograph.
Being kind of self-taught on this matter, I understand that there are a lot of different resources online, these are what helped me:

Scott Robertson - How to render (Gnomon DVD) ~ Scott Robertson teaches you a formula to understand how black and white value shading works on a certain object with a certain light. It is extremly important to be able to understand this formula he teaches in the DVD to be able to render stuff well, no matter how pretty your colors are.

Pratical Light and Color by Jeremy Vickery (Gnomon DVD) ~ Just overall absurdly excellent DVD, Jeremy is a Pixar artist, he teaches the same stuff Julianimator mentions to pick colors correctly and more! If you watch these two DVD's a few times and practice what's in them, you won't need any other resource. If you don't believe me, ask any Naughty Dog artist, this was their resource for Last of Us lighting.

A lot of teachers and artists have their own way of picking colors, you'll find many different theories, but they are just theories. Color theory itself, the one they teach at schools, was invented less than 100 years ago, so it is normal to be confused about this topic. The way I see it, it's a growing matter.

Edit: it's important to note, you shouldn't work by formula too, there are certain exceptions in nature. I recommend doing a few material studies before you venture into painting something, it's the way many professional artists work. It's not wise to want to discard that step.