Color Scheming

As a kid, nothing was more wonderful than new boxes of crayons: all the colors lined up in rows, each of equal size and potential. I loved dividing my stash into different palettes. I’d move the greens from the pinks to the reds and notice how all the hues seemed to shift.

This is how I learned to colors are relative. For example royal blue can feel bright and vivid or it can feel dull and tired depending on what’s next to it. The key to building effective color palettes is to pay attention to how all your colors are interacting. Most of the time I rely on plain, old intuition to decide on colors but when I’m stumped there are two techniques I use to jump start the process.

One Crayon Short of a Rainbow

This trick works really well when there is one color I know I don’t want to use. For example, if I’m designing a warm, homecoming scene I may not want any blue since it’s a cold color. Starting with every other color I change the lightness and darkness of the some of the hues, maybe make two lighter and two darker. Then I blend some of them into each other a bit so they look more unified.

When in Doubt, Gray it Out

I turn to this technique when I have one or more colors in a palette that aren’t working well with the rest. For example, I want to tweak this palette to look good on a rainy street but the brown and green are too warm and bright. They’re competing with the magenta. Mixing neutral grays into them to quiets them down and helps the colors that are working take center stage. Again as a last step I mix some of the colors into each other for a bit more harmony.

I hope from these quick sketches you can see how easy it is to come up with colors that work together. Whether using digital painting tools or crayons, mixing and trying things out are the best ways to find your picture’s perfect palette.