COLOR: AN IN-DEPTH LOOK

Art School Boot Camp: Harnessing Color

Color Relativity
Color Relationships
• Color is a tricky subject. It’s highly subjective, and the possibilities (especially when
working digitally) are limitless, which is sometimes more daunting than freeing.
• First off, let’s understand that colors are highly relative. By this I mean, a color looks how
it looks only because of its relationship to the other colors around it.
• The relativity of color can also be described as influence. A colors can influence its
neighbor to make that color appear different.
• For example, look at these orange squares. The color of the small square in the first pair
appears darker than the color of the small square in the second pair, right?

• But they’re actually the same color!

• The background color in each pair was influencing the color of the small square to make
it appear lighter or darker, and creating a sort of optical illusion.
• So we can’t just study colors on their own, because colors are never seen alone. We have
to study the interaction of the colors and how they influence each other.

Written by Christine Fleming for students enrolled in her Skillshare course: Art School Boot Camp: Harnessing Color
COLOR: AN IN-DEPTH LOOK
Art School Boot Camp: Harnessing Color

Brightness
More colors, more bright… right?
• People often decide they want their illustration to be really bright and colorful.
• So to achieve that, they use many different colors in the brightest intensities they can.
• But with so many bright colors mingling together, it really just becomes muddy, with the
colors neutralizing each other out.

How to achieve brightness

To get brightness in your illustration, you have to consider:
• Harmony (which we talked about in the color palette process videos)
• Contrast (which we talked about with the color schemes)
• Value (which... let’s talk about more!)

Tips on value
• It’s difficult to make a picture colorful and achieve brightness by using all pure color,
meaning all maximum intensity primary and secondary color.
• We need grayness and softness as a contrast to the brilliant areas.
• Often, the beauty of color lies in warm and cool variation, in the greyed or muted color
along with the pure and brilliant.
• Don’t be afraid to tone (or gray) your colors.
• Brightness, as with color, is also relative. A color has more brightness next to a greyed
color than it would next to a bright color.
• In this illustration here of a bacteria, both colors used have been grayed a bit and are not
used in their maximum intensity.
• Toning the red color increased the value
• Toning the blue color decreased the value
• When looking at the black and white version of the image, you can see that the
values are contrasting well because of the toning.
• There is also a good contrast of warm to cool colors.

Written by Christine Fleming for students enrolled in her Skillshare course: Art School Boot Camp: Harnessing Color
COLOR: AN IN-DEPTH LOOK
Art School Boot Camp: Harnessing Color

Value
What is value?
• Value is the level of intensity in a color.
• Think of a black and white scale applied to a color scale
• The most intense color is in the middle of the value scale.
• The color lightens as the value increases on the scale, and darkens as it decreases its value.

Using value to plan color

• If you can’t successfully work with values, color is going to be even more of a struggle.
• It’s often a good idea to do value studies in grayscale before you begin planning your color.
• This will give you a good basis for choosing colors using your color/value scale.
• Colors close in value (regardless of hue) will tend to merge.
• To achieve contrast, you have to consider value in addition to hue.
• Yellows, oranges and light greens are generally high values, but the purples, reds, browns, and dark
blues are generally low values.

Poor Values
This is an illustration I made a little while
back. I was trying to make the setting around
dusk when the sun is setting, and I loved my
color palette, but was really struggling with
values. You can see my value study in the
bottom left, and how the values don’t have Better Values!
too much contrast, and are kind of blurring Now look at the value study in the bottom left—it has much
together, which then ends up happening in stronger contrast! The colors have changed a bit too, but
the final illustration on the right as well. The choosing stronger and more contrasting values really make
colors I used were bright, but the values were each value stand out on their own making the overall piece
making them muddy. much stronger.

Value Comparison
You can see in the more successful value study, the darks have been pushed darker, and the lights have been
pushed lighter. This provides more contrast and stronger values, therefore stronger color! So when working
with values, you don’t have feel overwhelmed. Just start with a few basic values, and work from there. It will
do wonders for your color!
Written by Christine Fleming for students enrolled in her Skillshare course: Art School Boot Camp: Harnessing Color
COLOR: AN IN-DEPTH LOOK
Art School Boot Camp: Harnessing Color

Color Inspiration

Aurelia Lange Hope Gangloff

Drew Shannon Jan van der Veken

Written by Christine Fleming for students enrolled in her Skillshare course: Art School Boot Camp: Harnessing Color
COLOR: AN IN-DEPTH LOOK
Art School Boot Camp: Harnessing Color

Color Inspiration

David Hockney Wassily Kandinsky

Zac Gorman Emilie Nolde

Written by Christine Fleming for students enrolled in her Skillshare course: Art School Boot Camp: Harnessing Color
COLOR: AN IN-DEPTH LOOK
Art School Boot Camp: Harnessing Color

Color Inspiration

Pablo Picasso Paul Klee

Vincent Van Gogh Shinji Fujioka

Written by Christine Fleming for students enrolled in her Skillshare course: Art School Boot Camp: Harnessing Color
COLOR: AN IN-DEPTH LOOK
Art School Boot Camp: Harnessing Color

Color Inspiration

Peter Chan Núria Tamarit

Gustav Klimpt

Written by Christine Fleming for students enrolled in her Skillshare course: Art School Boot Camp: Harnessing Color