The Simple Color Lesson I Use In All My Paintings

Hey everyone! In a previous lesson, we learned some key secrets of shading by looking at how light interacts with a styrofoam ball.

Well, through the magic of color technology, that ball is now in color.

So let's expand that black and white shading lesson. We'll learn about how light interacts with color and how we can be more precise with the colors we choose in our paintings.

So here's a photo of the ball under a single light source. To paint this, I'll follow a basic procedure with very clear steps.

And we'll refer back to this list as we go. So I'll start with the base color. The ball is red.

Seems easy enough, but there's more than one red to choose from.

Even sampling the light and shadow colors here show two different reds.

If this is the range of reds from about here to here, my advice is to pick something roughly in the middle to start with.

And we will use that color for both the light and the shadow. This is to give us the easiest possible starting point with color.

So I'll start painting here, taking away the white of the canvas, and now I'm essentially filling in that one red color.

Let's also paint a little bit of a background here. Alright, so there's our base color step done. Let's move on to light and shadow value.

One of the most important observations you'll make in painting is where the light family lives and where the shadow family lives.

And we're using a ball here because it's pretty easy to to see that. But you have to see it precisely, like this.

Think of it like cut out shapes, where this shape is obviously light and this shape is obviously shadow.

So when you paint light and shadow values, you actually want to start by thinking about drawing, plotting those shapes.

On this ball, it's pretty simple. I can just draw one line to denote the light and shadow families.

Then I'll take that same red, but a darker value, of course, to block in the shadows.

If you're wondering what values you should be using. Reference my other ball video, link on the screen, which is all about values.

And I can do the same thing for the cast shadow on the floor. The color choice here is just the same floor color, but darker.

Just for fun, I can mix in a few reds from the sphere. They're so similar in value, it doesn't really matter.

And this right here is a great starting point, not just for this painting, but for any painting you're doing.

We can take the next step now, light and shadow color.

Okay, to quickly recap, our light red and our dark red were the same red as seen here on the color wheel.

Now, while that's totally fine for a block-in, that's not how light actually produces color.

Light in real life generally encourages different colors between the light and shadow families.

These two colors here, which kind of span the outer limits of red, follow the general pattern of a warm light.

I shot our photo reference with a warm light. For comparison, here's the same scene shot with a cool light.

It's the same red ball, but the hues that say red are very different.

We will study a cool light in just a minute, but for now, let's go back to our original photo.

Our base color red was about here on the color wheel, and we now want to factor in the color of the light.

I used a tungsten bulb, which is orangey-yellow, and its color is going to force our base color red to move toward it.

Now, how much toward it? That depends on the saturation of the base color.

Let's bring this color back to its starting point. Imagine you had a less saturated base color.

That less saturated base color will move further toward the light.

You can almost think of base color as a force that the light has to overcome.

And the more saturated the base color, the stronger the force.

So as you can see here, I'm painting a more orangey red to represent our light source.

This will make your colors look like light instead of a coloring book.

I raised the value a bit to help as well, keeping the light family separate from the shadow family.

Again, I talked a lot about that in the value lesson. And okay, here's where we're at now.

And you might think, okay, so we have to do something to the shadow color now too, right? Well, not necessarily.

Just by moving one family, we've created a color temperature relationship.

Our lights are now warmer and our shadows, therefore, are cooler.

Before, there was no such relationship because the lights and shadows were the same color. Same hue, same saturation.

yes, they were different values, but value alone is typically not enough to change temperature.

A color needs to move to a different physical location on the color wheel for that. All right, let's move on now to halftones.

This can be a tricky one. Quick recap, the halftones are an area in the light family whose planes are turning away from the light just enough to become a step darker in value.

So if the average light area is, say, this area here, then this area is the halftone.

It's turning away from the light so it gets darker, but it's still in the light family

There's a subtle color move you want to make with halftones So this was our base color then we moved it to here for the light family the halftones then