Intuitive color and studies Guide
By Simone Grünewald
Introduction
Color used to be a mystery to me, I think there are artists
that intuit certain topics more than others. Color was very
unintuitive for me most of my time as an artists. I wasn’t
super bad but my color choices used to be very hit and miss.
I began to see drastic improvements a couple of years ago
when I started doing studies. Studies of landscapes and
studies of light. Before doing these I roughly knew color the-
ory and also had heard of hue, value and saturation, but I
did not really grasp it. 2008: MY first landscape study
I did my first landscape study back in 2008 but I did not I spent ages on this and hated
the result and shrugged land-
pursue doing them regularly till much later.
scapes studies off as not for
I remember how hard they were at the beginning, restarting
me.
doing them roughly 2014. But every half year/whole year or
so I’d start doing a series of studies and I noticed how every
session became more pleasurable and how they effected my
perception of color when I did more than just 3 per year.
In this guide I would like to give you some tools to make do-
ing studies a bit easier, since it can be quite a tedious pro-
cess to get to a level where they start to be fun.
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WHICH Brush do I use
When doing digital studies I try to work in a similar fash-
ion as I would in traditional art and use a small amounts of
layers.
I tried a bunch of brushes for my studies over the years
and this one at slightly reduced opacity produces the nicest
textures and mixes of color.
But as studies come close to a something like handwriting
you really have to look for one that produces the best re-
sults for you.
I like the other gouache brushes by Max U a lot too!
Watercolor brushes don’t work as well for studies since they
change in saturation and value when layering strokes on top
of one another.
From Max Ulichney’s “Retro Pack”
These strokes
were done with the
same brush size,
but different tilts
of the pen
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WHY USE A BASE color
Doing a base color for my
studies really changed the
game for me.
What does the base color do
for the painting, you may Base turned off
ask.
Well, it ties all the colors
together and unifies them
by mixing with the slightly
transparent strokes and by
peaking through here and
there adding warm random
specs
The studies without the base
look duller and each color
stands more separate from
the others. A green tree is a
green tree alone,
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Base turned off Base turned off
WHICH COLOR TO CHOSE AS A BASE
I usually choose a rather
warm and saturated mid
tone.
The reasoning being I paint
a lot of greens and they get
balanced by these comple-
mentary colors.
But honestly the warm tones
have been working with ev-
ery kind of landscape up
till now. Maybe if I where
to do a study of sand dunes
I would try more of a cool
tone to counter balance
them.
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How to Pick colors
When painting a study I usually try to eyeball the colors
from the reference. Sometimes I try to exaggerate the colors
a bit too.
But actually seeing color properly takes practice and I’d
recommend you start by eyeballing the color from the ref-
erence and then use the color picker and check how far off
you where.
It’s not about getting the color right perfectly, this is about
getting better at an approximation. You will notice that you
will understand better how low in saturation some colors in
reality are and how they look different in relation to each
other. The base color will give it more vibrancy than in the
reference, which I like but obviously makes it less accurate.
I don’t aim for accuracy with my studies
If you want to dive deeply into understanding color I can
recommend the book ”Color and Light” by James Gurney!
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REFERENCES from MAPCRUNCH
I like working with mapcrunch.com. It gives you license free
random reference landscapes from google maps that you
can look around in at 360.
What I have taken to doing is trying to find something
worth studying in every random landscape. That way I
don’t only do comfort zone landscapes and it saves time
since I have spent hole evenings just skipping from land-
scape to landscape in search of an INCREDIBLE scene.
But that’s just me. You can also go to a specific county and
jump around on the map to get different views.
They can be rather desaturated which is another reason for
saturated bases.
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STEP BY STEP
Load your reference
into procreate by
going to:
Actions> Canvas>
Reference
1. Color block in, use a bright
and saturated warm tone. This
will make the study more vi-
brant which is especially nice
if the reference is a bit dull.
2. Sketch again with a rather
saturated color set to multiply
on a new layer.
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3. Try to block in dark shapes 5. Working further from back 7. With most of the color in 9. Add the last foreground
rather than do lots of lines. to front. Add color roughly place, use the sky (possibly on element and begin to detail to
That way you also are doing sticking to the shapes in the a new layer on top) to “sculpt” your liking.
some value planning. Here some sketch the colors in the back the shapes and make them more
stylization already takes can be tinted bluer than at the precise.
place. front.
4. On a new layer, with broad 6. Continue adding rough color. 8. The Sky here simplified into 9. To Touch up, Duplicate the
strokes. Begin to add the col- two colors and values. whole painting, flatten it and
ors seen in the ref to the back. experiment with layer effects.
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11. At the end erase the parts of
the layer with the layer effect
(here soft light at 50 %) that
don’t add the desired effect.
Here I erased the parts that
looked too dark.
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