do you have any tips on how you color? your coloring style is similar to what i’m trying to achieve but i have no idea how you actually pull it off
Hi!
I'm gonna separate this question into rendering vs. coloring. I'm not sure which you mean so hopefully tackling both covers your question, although I'm not really the best at explaining things.
For rendering, I usually paint using some square/textured brush (kind of like the one pictured below and a low opacity circle brush (the standard in photoshop, and most painting software). Lately I like using brushsets from the digitalbrushes account here on tumblr.
I sketch, and then paint underneath the sketch. after i paint for long enough I either delete the sketch layer or I merge the two. I like to add texture where the midtones are. I think a lot of my "rendering style" is probably owed to that.
I like adding texture around midtones. I also like adding limited random variation of color and value to large areas. Like below, you can see that I added a slightly different shade of red to the lit part of the apple in step 3. If you add variation or slight gradation to the large light shapes or shadow shapes you can create the impression of depth. At the very least it looks more fun.
Also a disclaimer, but for the last two drawings I did I've kind of went off kilter. The process is the same but I used some oil paint brushes I downloaded and I pretty much added as much variation to every shape possible, which I would not recommend unless you're sure of what you're doing. But you can see here that even though I added variation (in color, brush stroke, etc) that the shapes are pretty readable and the light is very clearly separated from the shadow.
In terms of choosing color, I had a long stretch of time where nothing would look right to me. Things were colored really literally, with no regard for lighting or ambient color (background/environment surrounding characters). I would often fix things up using a gradient map and using color burn or multiply on 14%. Honestly, this is still a great way to make things look coherent, I really like these gradient maps on the CSP asset store if you want to look into them.
My colors improved a lot after I developed an eye for color/figured out what colors I like to put next to each other. I did this by saving and making a folder of any piece I saw that I liked specifically for color. By doing this I got a clearer sense of what kind of color schemes I tend to like. I suggest doing this as well so that you can figure out what kinds of color schemes and pairings you tend to enjoy most.
Hopefully this answers your question <: ] Apologies if this doesn't make sense, it's a bit of a long post.
