04-27-2021, 12:50 AM
There's a lot to be said about colors. There's mood, being truthful to phenomena, depicting materials, widening your palette, training your eye to detect their relationships and more. I know that this doesn't sound very helpful but it's immensely useful to have interest in colors in first place. Like, what exactly do you want to do with them? What about colors draw you to a specific painting? This will guide the initial studies you'll make.
If you're feeling your palette is too restricted then speedpaint studies with some longer targeted ones to nail down some specific effect mixed with things from imagination is a good way to go.
If you feel your skin depictions are lifeless then studies + stuff from mind + reading about the physical properties of skin (subsurface scattering, reflectance relationship to skin tone) will help. A similar approach of observation and thinking hard about it will also help with understanding colors behavior in lights and shadows.
Understanding warm vs cold is more a matter of staring intently at things you like to see how these are used and why before trying your hand at these out of duty to "doing the things under the color theory" umbrella. It'll also require training your eye to the relatively of colors, as they can get drastically warmer or colder depending on what's surrounding them.
And regarding muddy colors, it usually happens when you have either way too saturated hues everywhere or mixes plain black/white or you substitute for black and white (like purple and yellow) indiscriminately for light and shadows. It's a matter of working with a narrow, insecure palette, often compounded by misplaced hue/value transitions. You get out of it by broadening yours, by getting used to use different colors and multiple degrees of lack of colors.
If you're feeling your palette is too restricted then speedpaint studies with some longer targeted ones to nail down some specific effect mixed with things from imagination is a good way to go.
If you feel your skin depictions are lifeless then studies + stuff from mind + reading about the physical properties of skin (subsurface scattering, reflectance relationship to skin tone) will help. A similar approach of observation and thinking hard about it will also help with understanding colors behavior in lights and shadows.
Understanding warm vs cold is more a matter of staring intently at things you like to see how these are used and why before trying your hand at these out of duty to "doing the things under the color theory" umbrella. It'll also require training your eye to the relatively of colors, as they can get drastically warmer or colder depending on what's surrounding them.
And regarding muddy colors, it usually happens when you have either way too saturated hues everywhere or mixes plain black/white or you substitute for black and white (like purple and yellow) indiscriminately for light and shadows. It's a matter of working with a narrow, insecure palette, often compounded by misplaced hue/value transitions. You get out of it by broadening yours, by getting used to use different colors and multiple degrees of lack of colors.