Lemma Soft Forums

*cough* ok, that's a lame title for my thread XD;
While here, I've noticed that some people would use some art tips, and I happen to experiment and play around with pics a lot, so I decided to make a thread on my own to share some of my experiments/knowledge that could be useful to you =3

Related posts:
Picture decomposed in layers
viewtopic.php?p=38176#p38176
Simple sprite making
viewtopic.php?p=38078#p38078
Drawing groups in perspective (no foreshortening)
viewtopic.php?p=45420#p45420

Shortcuts:
Morning-Sunset-Night Palettes
viewtopic.php?p=39280#p39280
More Tutorials
viewtopic.php?f=13&t=2848&p=41231#p41231
Background variations and light 1 & 2
viewtopic.php?p=43163#p43163
viewtopic.php?p=43218#p43218
Drawing Human Figure: Basic & Fixing a drawing: structure-wise
viewtopic.php?p=45656#p45656
Overlay Coloring
viewtopic.php?p=45664#p45664

My tutorials on deviantART:
http://dejichan.deviantart.com/gallery/#Tutorials

Now, here it is a little experiment on shading I did, that I thought I'd share =3

Shading colors - making palletes
(image heavy!)
Unless I'm working with a multiply layer to do the shading, I always pick the shadow color by instinct... you know, with the color picker, I move a bit to te desaturated and darker area and then move to the blue in the spectrum.
But with my latter work, I've realizd that there should be a more quick and efficient way of picking the shadow colors and mantain a certain "uniformity" between all the colors used in the character design, and that could be used in several characters/pictures and keep this same "feeling"...
So, playing around, I found a fun way that actually works!

I made a random pic to test my coloring and used some pretty bright colors. I made a new layer called "pallette" and painted some dots representing the colors I used in the composition, and duplicated them some pixels away.
(image1)

Then I selected the duplicated spots and opened my Levels window. I pretty much played around here, desaturating, making darker at the RGB chanel, and then went on the separate channels and played moving things around until I got something nice. This stage is pretty much experimenting and having fun.


Now I make my pallette by making a color that's in the middle of my base color and my newly found shadow color. I do this by coloring a spot with the shadow color and then color softly over it with the base color. Repeat with all your base colors and voilá! you have a new pallette! =D You can make as many in-between colors as you want, I just made one.
I used my new pallette to color the whole pic!


Now, let's see what happens if we play differently with the Levels to make different shadow colors. (I was lazy and used the magic wand here >_o)


Playing around with levels will get you different combinations. You can also play with hue/saturation and lightness, or both!


And finally, I picked one of the pallettes above to color it again


So my suggestion is to play around with this method! Even if in the end you don't apply it to all your pictures, it's fun for coloring experimentation =P
If you want to keep all your characters or a series of pictures with the same kind of shading, you could do the base coloring of everything first and then make a base pallette with all of them and apply this method.

Hope it helps!
Please feel free to post more step-by-step things or tips that could hep people improve their art skills, and also feel free to ask/comment/whatever =3
I'll try to keep everything linked and organized in the first post.

Ooo...

Great tips! ^_^

Whee, thanks!

Do you happen to have "presets" (the amount of points changed in the relative Levels) for the following scenarios:

* Morning / Daytime colors
* Late Afternoon / Sunset
* Nighttime

Color styling is something I haven't looked into, since its usually just given as a separate ready-made pallette.

You suggest to experiment, I will! But did you discover any standard values that work well whatever the base colors?

I haven't tried that much yet ^^;; I just toyed with this today and thought I'd share.
I did an assignment not so long ago that was to color a same picture as in different hours of the day:

Morning: http://dejichan.deviantart.com/art/Vinca-and-Elian-morning-67633628
Here I used a multiply layer to do the shading with a light desaturated blueish purple. The color of the light is light yellow.

Sunset and Night: http://dejichan.deviantart.com/art/Vinc ... s-67644479
During sunset, the light is orange, so the shadows might be purple.
The night version was shaded with desaturated dark blue. The artificial light is a stronger yellow than the morning light, and the normal moonlight is light blue.
Daylight is also light blue-ish.

So you shuoud guide you Level playing to match that. You can also use the same method to create a "light" color: playing with levels and such to move toward the kind of light you're looking for.
Using a screen/overlay/soft light layer with the desired lihgt color on top of the image helps too.

I'll try to play more with that tomorrow or in a couple of days to illustrate.

Deji has now found herself in the Special Thanks credits in all my projects from now on...

Total awesomeness o__o... It's so simple, yet not so obvious!

Wow, that's such a great idea! Nice and simple
It's too late for me to use any of these techniques in my current project, but I will surely keep them in mind for my next one ^^ (And for general colouring experiments, hehe)

You're so great, Deji :3

Great tutorial. I think I'll try this out on my snes-tan.

lol! that was embarrassing. This went in the wrong thread last night.

ok, I'm pretty busy right now with stuff, so I haven't been able to give the morning/sunset/night pallettes a try =(
I played around with pallettes for my Martina sprite yesterday and wrote the numbers I used for the variations.
here it's the sprite with the palette:

You can see the sprite here:
viewtopic.php?p=39258#p39258

Now the initial values are he following:


Now, if you look at the initial/first result palette, some shadows are too saturated/bright. I noticed that while coloring, so on the sprite file (where I keep a copy of the palette for eyedropping purposes), I seleted the swatches from S1 to S2 and adjusted their Hue/Sat, giving them less light and less saturation, and then remaking the 50/50 swatches (the ones between each labbeled row, generated by mixing the colors 50/50)

So in the end, this is pretty much a matter of experimantation~

This palette is bassed on a redish/purple shadow and a yellow light, btw.

Ok, took me a while (I should be working on other stuff >___<;;;)
but it was a fun experiment =P

Here a test palette for Morning, Night and Sunset.

Bx, in this case, is a light variation of the B column.

Procedure was:

B --> S1 --> S2
B --> Bx --> L
S1 comes from B, but L comes from Bx.
Maybe it would have been a better idea to make B-->Bx -->S1 --> S2... ;;;

I'll post the value tables in a minute~

The best is to know when to stop when fiddling around with color tone and that you have a deadline coming soon, else it take hours of fun

Value tables of Level adjusting for Morning, Night and Sunset:


In the final palettes, I swapped some of the colors, thou, between L and Bx, because sometimes the Bx olor (ie the white) would be lighter than the L color.... dunno why, thou ^^;

Anyway, just keep experimenting and don't limit yourseñves to the numbers and methods I exposed here!~ You can do pretty much whatever you want as long as you feel it looks ok for you =3

Thank you for posting all these things, it must have taken some times!

I tested my palette presets once again, this time the morning and night one.
I needed a test background for Astre@, so I made the school entrance based on a couple of pictures I found online.
The drawing process was to make a rough sketch, then a more defined one on the drawing borad with rulers and stuff, and then make the lineart in photoshop mostly with the pen tool.

The background basic composition are (from top to bottom)
- Light effects
- Gate (open and close)
- Foreground elemements (wall and guard post thingie)
- Plants (grass, trees and the other plants)
- summer version
- autumn version
- Background elements

I first made a flat colored base of each layer of elements like this:

Then I made a palette with the presets on the table I posted earlier, and started coloring!
After hours and hours of playing around, adding a texture layer for the brick walls and light effects, it ended up looking like this (resized and watermarked version because it's project material ^^; )

I remade the trees leaves like... 4 times DX

I repeated the process with the night version, and added a couple of multiply andsoft light layrs to give a better atmosphere =3


The image working size is 2000x1500 and it's around 8mb. The bigger you work, the more tiny mistakes you're able to overlook, since they won't be noticeable when shrinking ^^

On a random note, last night I was telling my mother how proud I was on making my first decent background ever, and she said "uhm... yeah, its nice". I was dissapointed ._. Later she told me that she thought that I traced the thing from a photo and that I was just eyeballing DX

Time spent:
sketch+lineart+flats+morning version = around 7 hours? (I worked from 10 am to 2 am on and off, maybe it took me more O_o)
Night version: 3 hours

Omg.. look at those backgrounds!! O_O Your art is to fall in love with Deji ^^;

Gahhh... I wish I had more time to practise... I need to improve a lot!! Still thanks for all the hints and support you have been putting here dji.. they are really helpfull ^^