Got some honest feedback from a random artist on a livestream about my color choices last night

She said my shadows were too muddy and suggested I try a blue-violet tint instead of just darkening the base color, and after I fixed the painting it popped way more than I expected in about 20 minutes of tweaking.

3 comments

3 Comments

james927d ago

Wait, you're serious about blue-violet for shadows?

wadea537d ago

The whole blue-violet thing actually comes from the way our eyes see light. When you're outside on a clear day, the sky scatters blue light everywhere, and that blue light bounces off everything including your subject and fills in the shadow areas with a cool tone. I noticed it myself last summer when I was painting a fence in my backyard around 4pm and the shadows under the boards had this faint purple hint to them. So if you're trying to mix a shadow color on a sunny day, throwing a tiny bit of blue-violet into your dark mix makes it look way more natural than just using black or brown.

gibson.oliver5d ago

Not me, but I had a buddy who paints miniatures and he swore by that trick. He was doing a little Warhammer figure one night and mixed a tiny bit of blue-violet into his black base for the cloak shadows. He showed me the finished piece and I gotta admit, those shadow areas looked way more alive than if he'd just slapped on some plain black. Looked like the little guy was actually standing in some evening light.