Tutorials

Color Selection in Illustration and Painting

Tutorial 1 with Bonnard Template – Exercise 1

In these tutorials, we’ll look at how the HVC Color Composer can help you with color selection with a more illustrative or painterly process where colors are layered upon each other to create more subtle contrasts, rather than creating hard edges through bold fields of color.

But the basic principles will be the same. Colors will be chosen based on their contrast relationships with existing colors to create proportional schemes. It is highly recommended you go through the earlier tutorials first, where these principles are established thoroughly.

This process involves a special method for filling the contents of a layer with a color. Click here for a method for coloring these special template layers in Photoshop.

Before -- After

Step 1

Open the Bonnard template. You may download the template here.

Step 2

Hide all layers except for L1. Choose a color for the background rectangle. Here we chose a yellow as a base to underlie the numerous subtle layers to follow.

Step 3

A palette is created from the yellow, range 40. A purple is selected, and layer L2 is filled using the special layer coloring method.

Step 4

Layer L3 and L4 are both filled in succession. First L3 is filled with a light color, chosen from a 20 range from the yellow. Then L4 is filled with a slightly lighter color, a 5 range from the color we just selected, for a very subtle relationship. The subtle layering process begins to take shape this way. You can use the original tones of the template as a loose guide for when colors should have subtle contrasts from certain colors, and when they should have strong contrasts. This can be in part weighed against the original gray tone contrast, in part your own intuition, and in part pure experimentation. Feel free to try a number of alternatives before moving on to the next step.

Step 5

Layer L5 is filled with a 20 range color from the yellow.

Step 6

Layers L6 and L7 are colored in succession. L6 with an orange, a 5 range color from the color we just used. L7 with a red, a 20 range color from that color.

Step 7

Fill layers L8 and L9. We filled L8 with a green, a 10 range from the orange on L6. L9 was filled with a blue, a 20 range from the yellow on L1.

Step 8

L10 is filled with a dark blue, a 60 range from the foliage color on L4.

Step 9

L11 is filled with a blue-green, a 40 range from the same color on L4.

Step 10

L12 is filled with another subtle color, a 5 range from L4. Then L13 is filled with white, while L14 is filled with black. The composition is complete. The layers were built up rapidly for a painterly effect, while all the colors exist in strongly coherent proportion.

Next - Exercise 2