THIS IS JUST HOW I WORK WITH COLOR AND ISN'T DEFINITIVE. IT'S DESIGNED TO HELP GUIDE FOLKS THAT WANT IT, NOT TO TELL PEOPLE THAT THEY'RE "DOING IT WRONG". I HAD TO ADD THIS BECAUSE FOR SOME REASON PEOPLE TREAT REFERENCES, TUTORIALS AND OTHER GUIDES AND TIPS AS SOME KIND OF PERSONAL ATTACK AND I'M NOT DEALING WITH IT.

These are the color swatches I use to paint, grayscale first then overlay with hues either while painting or before hand by making a swatch sheet. The Zorn Swatches can be used to make literally make ANY natural skin tone you want by mixing these four colors to create a base hue and overlay it over your gray tone values for shading. lastly, if can create color shifts in the gray tone by using two complementary colors of the same saturation with one as our light at 90 Value, and the other as 10 Value, which mean the middle will remain gray, causing the true hue to shine through in the overlay while causing the color shifts you want based on lighting. in the example, i wanted red color shifts in the shadows, so I used it's complement, cyan, as the light color in the example above.

Again, this is just how I do things and this is using the RGB color Palette. In prints (CMYK) the same hold true but one must remember the CMYK has a smaller color gamut (total number of colors within a color systems spectrum) than RGB so things may not translate 100 percent. lastly, I'm not sure if this would work in RYB, as it has the smallest gamut and when painting Irl, it's simply easier to mix the paints as you need them in my opinion, instead of attempting to overlay them like on a computer. with RYB, you can mix colors in halfs to get secondary colors (for example, yellow+blue gets green) and so on and so forth to get the various palettes in that spectrum and add white or black paint to get tints and shades or add gray paint to get tones.

Lastly, for those that want to claim that one color wheel is more "Real" than the other, all color wheels are limited by their gamut and how the colors are mixed. light & additive color has the widest color gamut of the three I mentioned here and RYB the lowest, however, a wider color gamut doesn't make one superior to the other and none of these three cover the full range of colors the human eye can see, let alone what some other animals can see. So reather than trying to choose the "Best" color system, think about what your end result needs to be. if you want to make something digital and only digital, RGB will work, for print? stick within cmyk (unless you have access to some of the higher end printers but i only learned pantone colors to pass color theory and I don't have that kind of money so.... yea...) and if you're aiming to make something look painterly, use a program like rebelle or mimic the "natural" color palette by limiting your color range and how you mix colors. (or if you're painting, and you can save cash by just picking up red, yellow, blue, some kind of white and some kind of black and just mixing the colors you need as you go. only reason i could even afford to do most of the hand projects we had to do in color theory) But at the end of the day it all comes down to preference, which is why i choose to limit my palettes to values and saturations no higher or lower than 90 & 10, with the only exceptions being when i work in pure white and pure black, as those colors are reserved for thins like text, borders, whites of eyes, ectera. also, true black can't be shaded to darker and true white can't be highlighted to be any brighter. (both representing 0 light and 100% light) Oh and bear in mind that colors interact with one another. you'd be surprised how many colors look "white" or "black" in my paintings but are actually shades of blue, red and other colors.

So I think that's all i know about color theory without turning this into a massive ted talk. I will be uploading a pick showing the range of the zorn palette for natural skintones but honestly, if you actually want to learn some stuff about painting and use the tips to develop your skills, i'd suggest checking our marco bucci. their videos honestly saved me in college 'cause unless you learn how to apply this stuff in your works, it's going to go in one ear and out the other (at least it did for me. I'm not great with just repeating information. if i can't use it, I lose it. :/ ) And don't be afraid to make mistakes, experiment, and break the rules to create what YOU want to create. art is about expression and if I can draw all this weird random stuff, then if you wanna make a rainbow dog, then you get out there and make the raddest rainbow dog this world has ever seen!

https://www.youtube.com/user/marcobucci/videos

Posted using PostyBirb