How to do half assed digital colouring without learning colour theory

[alias_sqbr]

If you want your colouring to look really great, colour theory is an invaluable tool. Here's a tutorial I found super useful.

But if that's all a bit intimidating and you just want some tips on how to make your colouring look ok without having to learn much theory, then the half-assed method I'm about to describe is a good place to start. I've used a flat anime-ish style but if you soften the shading the same technique works for other styles. Most of my art uses variations on this technique.

I'm definitely not an expert...except at being half-assed ;) I'm assuming you know the basics of how to use whatever art program you're using. Fire Alpaca is simple, free program that does this sort of thing pretty well, there's a bunch of tutorials on youtube.

There's extra info in the footnotes but feel free to ignore it!

Anyway. Here's a head:


Let's imagine a light source. I'm going to put it on the top right corner, and make it a pale orange-yellow.


Coloured light means coloured shadows. For bright orange-yellow light, that means dark purple-blue shadows(*):


I find it easier to draw the shadows first. I created a "multiply" layer at 30% opacity and paint in shadows in that dark blue(**):


[This is the point where I realised I have no idea how to shade this kind of hairstyle haha. The best way to do good shading is to look up references, but we're being halfassed, so I just went with my unreliable gut.]

Now the light! I usually either do big soft patches of light or smaller distinct ones, but for this tutorial I'll do both.

I created a "screen" layer at 30% and painted in lighting with the pale orange from before(***):


Finally I create another "screen" layer with the same pale orange but at 65% opacity, and add a few small patches of bright light:


And there's our halfassed colouring!

Advanced mode:
I made the lines a dark purple-blue, and added a "soft light" layer with a nice texture.( a circular watercolour gradient from yellow to purple):


(*)Colour theory alert: because blue and orange are on opposite sides of the colour wheel. Yellow light means purple shadows, red light means green shadows, etc. Your art program probably has a colour-wheel option on the colour picker to make this easier.
(**)What this does in practice is make colours darker, bluer, and greyer.
(***)What this does in practice is make colours lighter, oranger, and greyer. So the midtone sections of the picture that don't have shadows OR lighting on them end up the most intensely coloured/saturated.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

Wow.

I've never realized how much is going on in coloring. When done well, it sorta disappears to my untrained eye.

Thanks for the education.

[alias_sqbr]

Thanks, I'm glad you found it educational! I had to teach myself to start noticing this stuff, before I used to just stare at my art and stare at other people's and go "they are doing something better but WHAT??".

[winterbird]

This is so awesome :D My approach to colouring is often 'I learned colour theory a long time ago and now I just half ass it and go with what feels right.' Whoops.

But I love the way the colours shift in this, and also holy crap the transformation. O.O

[alias_sqbr]

Ha, well, to give some idea how shaky my colour theory is, the first draft said "yellow and blue are on opposite sides of the colour wheel".