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General rules for picking environment shades/palettes

polycounter lvl 11
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MainManiac 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?

Replies

  • ikken
    you should start with picking a few traditional artists who are smh relevant to stuff you're planning to paint yourself and observe their color decisions; keep in mind traditional painters plan their palette in the "preproduction" stage of painting, do a few short etudes/studies, and carry that onto full-blown painting.
    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.
  • Lord McMutton
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    Lord McMutton polycounter lvl 17
  • SHEPEIRO
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    SHEPEIRO polycounter lvl 17
    i'm no mean concept artist so there may be way better ways of doing this...and this may sound a bit basic and obvious... but the three R's.... reference reference reference

    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

    colour.jpg
    colour2.jpg
  • jordan.kocon
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    jordan.kocon polycounter lvl 13
    I know a lot of people, that if say, they are working on a blue sci fi scene, they will find a piece of concept art of blue sci fi area, and literally just colour pick from the concept art. From there you can take the different hues and shades from the concept art and make a pallet that you like. http://kuler.adobe.com/ This website is nice too. I'm not sure if you know it, but basically it is people uploading colour schemes (5 colours per scheme). It has a lot of very random colour schemes, but if you know what you're looking for and use the search function, you can find some pretty awesome colour pallets some time.
  • seforin
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    seforin polycounter lvl 17
    300px-color_icon_brown-svg.png

    Avoid this unless if your making a sewer.
  • leslievdb
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    leslievdb polycounter lvl 15
    seforin wrote: »
    300px-color_icon_brown-svg.png

    Avoid this unless if your making a sewer.
    or fall ...
    fall20.jpg
  • Joseph Silverman
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    Joseph Silverman polycounter lvl 17
    300px-color_icon_brown-svg.png
    or fall ...
    fall20.jpg


    desert-sunset-ipad-wallpaper.jpg

    frell: do studies. unified color comes through lighting.
  • seforin
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    seforin polycounter lvl 17
    Doh, was just trying to tease to ignore the next gen Brown pallet early next gen games did.
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