Color is important. It can tell a story all on its own. The colors you choose will influence how others perceive your character. Picking the right colors is an important step in the character design process.
With the right color choices, you can convey who your character is and their personality. Helping you tell their story without having to say a word.
While I am very loose and permissive on the drawing part, I am extremely severe and disciplined as far as colors go.
To me, a proper color palette is everything in a painting.
I rarely mix my colors, and when I do I make sure not to mix more than two.
I want my color to be bright, alive, and almost glowing.
I am obsessed with always finding new oil color tubes with the most uncommon colors, with the higher pigmentation, and with the craziest optical effect.
I’ve done a lot of study and experiments about the color palette, which is something very precise and it is as precise as mathematics. It is absolutely important to master complementary colors, what colors go together amazingly, fairly, or disgustingly, this is something one needs to train his mind and eyes on.
I personally like to keep people awake while they look at my art, and to do this I play a lot in contrast and make some hazardous decisions that create tricks on the mind.
To give you some examples: “Dome” this painting apparently is a yellow scale, but if you look closer, the entire horizon line and some details in the trees too are pink, that pink was mixed with raspberry-red and pale-Naples-yellow, this combo help to create a pink shade that is cold instead of hot. If you look carefully on the right you will see a tiny dome, the actual subject of the painting, and that is done in a light turquoise-blue
Another example is “Moon kissed”, this is clearly a night scene, but the tree has the same color as the moon, the moon is on the back of the tree so the truck shouldn’t be so light and for sure not so white, yet, here I wanted to clearly depict the fact that the moon was “kissing” the tree with its light, so the best was to make it unmistakable was to use the same color for both. You see this isn’t any close to realism, it is not what reality used us to see, but this is what helps me to create an unmistakable emotional impact on the other end.
“Dare Me” is another perfect example. The whole painting is built on a blue scale, mixed with some light Naples yellow on the skin, even her lipstick is blue (inspired by a blue lipstick that I actually own =D)
However in the background, we see a nice peach red that would have worked so well on her lips, yet it is put on an abstract background.
