I fell for the no colors, just values meme, and for years I didn'd bother coloring anything.
Now I can't use colors for shit.
How do I learn color?
The sticky resource wasn't much help. I understand the theory and can't apply.
Look at other's people art and how they applied color, DO IT MORE, and watch some Marco Bucci https://youtu.be/nINus0lYQjo
it's really straight forward, I don't know if you're expecting some kind of special trick that's gonna make you learn color instantly.
>>2507006
Post your work. If you really do have good values then learning colour will come easier since value is the largest component of it.
I recommend just doing lots of quick colour studies. Spend maybe 20 or 30 minutes on each painting. Set up still lifes, do master copies, studies from photos etc.
When it comes to colour the order of importance goes Value>Temperature>Saturation>Hue.
http://www.huevaluechroma.com/
This site will explain all the theory you need.
Who told you no colors just values?
I've heard 'values are more important than colors' which is true, not "ignore color entirely and just do values" unless you mean people suggesting it as a tool to learn value.
You still need to actually learn colors, understand value is just a vital element of that.
While you're coloring, if it's digital, greyscale it every now and then and check your values that way. If you have a marginal understanding of value from that year you spent you can usually quite quickly find out what's off about your colors by finding what's off about their value.
Steve Huston's formula
Local color of obj + light source color = color of object in the light
Local color of obj + the complement of the light source color = color of object in shadow
That way you have a common color (the light source) in every object in the scene.
A red object under a blue light would be
Red + Blue (like a very pastel blue) = a more cooler light plane
Red + Orange (almost like a burnt sienna) = a warmer dark plane
And then you just mix until you get the desired value.
Additionally, it's important to learn that it is possible to change the temperature of a color without changing the value. Especially for the color zones on the face.
>>2507006
there are few rules. think about value, think about tastefulness, think about color temperature. make it have a purpose, but make it look tastefully stylized. reall hard thing to learn. comes mainly from years of grinding.
>>2507027
>I don't know if you're expecting some kind of special trick
This is so true, don't get me wrong, but it's basically in every single thread where people ask for advice on how to learn something.
It just comes off as belittling, because absolutely everyone knows that learning something takes practice, except for 10 year olds.
>>2507032
I was in the same boat as OP a while back, and i had a huge problem with controlling my values while using color, but had no problem when working in b&w. Beginners should definitely focus on learning values, but forgetting color is extremely counterproductive.
If i just practiced with color from the start, my work would be alot better than it currently is, and i would save the countless hours that i spent learning values again with color.
>>2507006
use eyedropper tool
>>2507580
I agree that value and colour should be learned simultaneously. I actually find my values are better when I paint in colour too since I become more aware of local colour/value and I can turn form and things with temperature or colour shifts rather than accidentally being heavyhanded with a big value shift.
>>2507046
I'm not following how to use that image properly can you show a quick example
>>2507041
Not OP but I've heard quite a few times when /ic/ said to coloring/shading in greyscale.
>>2507573
>It just comes off as belittling, because absolutely everyone knows that learning something takes practice, except for 10 year olds.
It *is* belittling because the people who tell others to "just practice,bro" almost always manage to conveniently skip the actual useful information such as what to look out for, useful exercises and how to go about them, that sort of thing...
Telling people to practice is literally the least helpful thing. Everyone already knows this. OP knows this, it's why they made the damn thread.
They want purposeful, directed practice.
>>2507979
Exactly.
>>2507006
I'm digging now through this book and I like it, saw it recommended by other anon also.
Basically what's different than only learning color theory is part how to make your own color studies and how to analyze color. This book is filled with tips how to describe color and how to build your visual library.
It's very extensive though. I found out through reading it that there's a lot of knowledge related to color. It's good though that author starts simple, you know, complementary colors on a wheel of color, what are earth-tones, how do colors interact or how light influences our seeing of color etc.
I'm also a total, total n00b on the topic, but what I gathered from various sources:
1. Edges of color seem to be incredibly important, especially to painters. Schmidt in his "Alla Prima" puts a huge emphasis on that and I saw painters on their videos also talking about them.
2. Medium is important. If you do watercolor, you want to start the lightest possible because you can't go darker with it. On the other hand, with gouache you start dark because you can always go lighter because you have access to white.
3. Values aren't a meme, it's one of the 3 components of color so if you have those strong, you could focus on learning more about Hue and Saturation. Hue is pretty intuitive to grasp, so what you would like to do in your situation is probably to focus on understanding the color saturation and do color studies related to it.
I will dump few pages related to color studies from that book.
Download this book "Color and Light - James Gurney"
its a large book but people are veryyy positive about it , one said "the only book you need for mastering coloring"
>>2507967
I've seen the suggestion for people to draw in greyscale to focus on value, but the principle of that is to teach them how value works, not to magically teach them color theory.
Bad values will just make your drawing look bad no matter how much thought you put into your color selection.
>>2508472
But you should just practice both at the same time. Maybe do a couple of valuestudies here and there because it's so important, but generally do both all the time.
>>2507006
This will make understanding color easier then you ever thought.
Color the Daniel Greene Method.
>>2508472
For me they specifically said it'll help make coloring easier.
>>2507046
Uhhh... A red object under a blue light would be black.
>>2509278
Theres no such thing as a red object, only an object reflecting red light.
>>2509279
Okay, I think you understand me. An object who only reflects red would be black under a blue light.
>>2509285
But my red light reflecting shirt doesn't look black in the shadow on a sunny day(blue sky light source)
>>2509318
That's because the light from the sun is white, there is albedo and light bounces everywhere, your shirt is not 100% red and the sky doesn't give 100% blue light.
>>2509350
My point is, that thinking of color as something so binary is limiting, its better to focus on the color of the light and work around that. Something that is red under white light can be blue under blue light you just need to make the relationships to the other colours work in that context too.
>>2507778
It took me a while to understand.
But use it like you would use a palette for traditional painting.
With traditional painting, you can have a color (skin tone for example) and add different colors to kind of create a gradient of that skin color as it goes warmer, redder, bluer, greener, etc. And then you can pick out from this gradient the color and value you want.
This color picker just makes that easier for digital painting. If you move vertically through the image, you're changing temperature. If you move horizontally, you're changing value.
Also remember colors at their purest form at full saturation appear at different values. So the purest red is at the 9th value slot. Whereas a pure yellow is at the 2nd value slot, and a pure green is at the 5th value slot.
Having it laid out like this removes any of the "figuring it out" from the traditional color picker in photoshop.
So lets say I'm painting a red apple and part of the apple is slightly more yellow. Rather than having to pick a yellow color to match the red's value, I can just go here, find the yellow I want in the Red's value range, I can find how intense I want the yellow to be, then place it right onto my apple.
It takes some getting used to, but it's super helpful.
>>2507573
Experienced artists like to say that practice is all you need, but they forget to tell you convenient things like "transfer mode on your brush can help when digital painting" or "use multiply layers for coloring a black and white scan". Yeah you can eventually find thse things out but if someone tells you off the bat your art looks better way faster.
op here
thanks for all the replies so far, I read all of them just couldn't add anything useful for a reply
>>2509308
I pirated it and I think also from kat, so far it seems that all diagrams and illustrations are ok. Which ones don't display for you?
I sometimes have issues with Foxit when .pdfs are of high quality and with quite large sizes, but it's mostly because I tend to have 50+ tabs in browser opened, few other .pdfs, CAD program with another few files opened etc., so freeing memory by closing other programs and .pdfs helps.
>>2511090
Alright thanks for confirming. I just opnened the pdf using chrome's native pdf reader, it displays totally fine. it seems that my pdf reader is just outdated.
>>2511473
can you kindly post a download link? 3rd world wifi does jack shit when downloading books with -38 seeders
>>2507046
>Steve Huston's formula
Is this information available somewhere from the horse's mouth?
On a similar note, can anyone remember the app that allows you to simulate how different colours of light mix with different local colours (from a thread a while ago)
I remember it had just a ball on a plane but you could vary both of their local colours (and the light source). It was also a paid app iirc.
