I remember the moment that I understood color relativity and it broke my brain. I was recreating the Charizard sprite pixel by pixel and realized that it's mostly pink. Design as a whole looks orange, but it's majority pink pixels.
Awesome advice. What I find frightening is the obvious knowledge the old classic painters had over this thing, without any color circle, without any saturation analysis without any technology. They just knew what to do out of sheer talent and experience.
I think the old masters knew and studied a lot more science than we realize. They probably understood a lot of these things, they just didn't have the same technical terms that we do now.
They didn't have a digital colour circle but they did have physical colour studies. In europe, for example, from the Middle Ages until the XIX century, apprentices/students went through strict training for years before they were recognized as legitimate painters. They had to know how to prepare the paint, how to properly mix colours, different brush techniques, anatomy, composition, etc. It's honestly not that different from today - if you want to be a good painter you have to put in that same work. It's just some tools/materials and nomenclature that has changed.
Also, has others have pointed out in different comments, this particular knowledge of colour relativity is often more intuitively/easily understood and applied in material painting rather than digital. Having to constantly mix pigments to get different colours will "force" you to understand colour theory faster than if you're able to pick any colour you want with a click.
I guess one other tip from an artist currently in art school, is that the more you desaturate a colour, the more it will look like its complementary colour. For example, if you desaturate red to almost gray and shift it towards orange slightly, and then paint that new colour onto pure red, it will look like green despite being just desaturated/gray orange. If you desaturate orange by a lot and shift it slightly closer to red, then paint that new gray colour onto orange, it will look like a dull or silvery blue. This is especially useful when colouring skin. We've all had that moment where a shadow looks blue, but then you try to paint it and ohh now they look like they have a bruise! Try desaturation your skin colour and shifting it closer to magenta, then you will get that blue-ish shadow without making it look like the character has paint on their skin. I hope this helps at least one person out there :)
The confusion comes from using digital painting. Cuz with real paint mixing you would essentially desaturate color by mixing in the color that u perceive with your eyes and at no point need you to discover that it’s “actually” grey bc u r mixing those up relationally already one from another
@@wiwita63 very true. And the way palettes on the digi drawing software are all presented against said software/white background as opposed to mixing paint in relation to the painting itself
I feel like I've found a Holy Grail. This is precisely the issue I struggled on with color, and now, I feel enlightened. I will put this into practice immediately. Thank you.
I also learned majority of my color relativity from Marco Bucci, and in one of his videos he said we don’t necessarily have to pick the exact color but as long as we move into that direction we’re gonna be ok. And that snapped something in my brain that when I tested it, it did look more like the color I was trying to go for! You’ve also proved it at 1:28 where the grass looked green but is actually orange, and if one noticed, it is going towards the direction of green somewhat desaturated etc. Very interesting, thank you for sharing free lessons like these Proko 💕
Wow, this will actually make my art bloom. I have long time like struggled to andorstand why when I colour pick the colour itself is fully opposite from what I tried, now I can actually do proper landscape study and just make it so much more better
I've dabbled very lightly in digital art for a few years now and have never been able to fully grasp colour relativity, despite watching and attempting to apply several tutorials. Jeremy's explanation of this makes SO. MUCH. SENSE. Quick and easy with an actual practical demonstration of how it works and how to choose the colours yourself. Using the eyedropper + colour wheel to illustrate what he meant was a great choice. I've never paid for an art course before, but this is making me SERIOUSLY consider giving his course a shot, wow
@@nawenyxar4378 I have a red and green deficiency and the way I perceive them is that they're both red and green. Only when they're at their most saturated can I tell that a red is red and a green is green
@@nawenyxar4378 well there's different kinds of it. For me personally, it makes some shades of green indistinguishable from gold or orange, lime green being indistinguishable from yellow and teal being indistinguishable from grey. For the reds, it makes pinks indistinguishable from grey and dark reds indistinguishable from desaturated greens, yellows and browns. Coz of this I have a problem on identifying whether a color is green-shifted or red-shifted or just desaturated, or both hue-shifted+desaturated. I didn't think it was that bad until recently and people kept pretending I was faking it XD
The repainting segment has SAVED me. I’ve come across some tutorials on this general idea before but they never really explained the desaturation+relativity concept properly. Seeing it in practice with the slight shifts the either side of the yellow was immensely helpful!
Thank you, THIS is exactly what I've been trying to understand for quiet some time. You gave the most precise, easy to understand explanation & demonstration for this.
Extremely amazing video and wonderful teacher, I've been an artist all my life and have never realized how important color relativity is! Not enough people talk about it! This video made it all click for me, and will forever change the way I make art. Thank you Proko for allowing people like me to access this kind of teaching free of charge, absolute life saver
OH my gosh i LOVE proko and i LOVE COLOR RELATIVITY!!! I clicked as soon as i saw this video pop up on my feed!!! I love color so much and I love messing with them, especially with grays in more saturated environments. I love practicing eye picking colors to make them look like they fit into a deeply colored environment. And I love (attempting) to teach people this concept. Color is so fascinating!!!!!!!! Great work from the proko team as always!
damn this was fascinating! i appreciate the actual method to pick the correct colours, i often see colour 'tutorials' where they show colours arent what they seem but they dont tell you how to go about picking the right ones instead. this seems pretty useful :D
I have been working as a proffessional cartoonist for about 20 years now, thought I knew the basics of color theory, and this blew my mind just now. I just learned something new.
Change your color selector to a model that has desaturated grey in the middle and its saturated hues in a circle around it. I don't know the name of it but that's helped me a ton when picking colors. If I want blue in a yellow atmosphere, I shift towards blue on the circle and get just less saturated yellow because I have to move through the middle which is grey.
I understood the concept but always struggled with implementing. I think you’re the first person I’ve found who’s actually explained how it’s done in digital media.
I previously heard about colour relativity from those illusions, but never put 2 & 2 together that this is the reason my paintings look off, or how to find the right colours. Thanks so much!
This reminds me of a video I saw on painting white (I’m not an artist by any description, excuse me if this is common knowledge in the art world), the “whitest” parts of it were basically brown but when the picture came together I could’ve sworn it was pure white.
This helped me alot with something ive been struggling alot with in painting, thank you, the way you simplified it really helped me understand, I seriously appreciate it:)
Thank you for this video! This is something I thought about a lot as a photographer aspiring to become a painter. I can take a photo of a white wall as the sun sets on it, but if I were to paint it, I'd have to use the colour orange, which seemed simple enough until I started asking myself, "What colour is red brick at night? What colour is grass during a sunset?" This video helps a lot!
I've probably been pretty close to understanding this, but it never really clicked until now. I think this has been the missing piece of color theory I've been looking for. I love bright colors, so I tend to go for vibrant cartoony art, but even in cartoony art, if everything is saturated vibrant color, nothing stands out. I've seen a lot of art with beautiful contrasts, and I've wanted to try it myself. I've never thought about picking a dominant color, pushing less dominant colors to gray tones in the same family as the dominant, and only using saturated colors for highlighted trims. I can't wait to try this.
I just finished a few color studies the other day and I noticed that I was running into this problem a lot. I wasn't sure what I was doing wrong so I just found ways to work around it. After watching this video everything just clicked, in my next few pieces I'm going to try this method to challenge myself and hopefully I'll see some improvement! :D
Dear god this video damn near made me cry. Earned yourself a like and sub. You have altered my life in an irreversible manner. I hope you understand the gravity of what you've just done.
I like to keep a layer off to to the side where i can test color combinations before committing to painting something because I know once I begin working on rendering I want to keep going. Just big blocks of color mark ups like you're blocking in an oil canvas and see how the temperatures and relativity works together and adjust accordingly so the blobs look like what you're going for. Then you can just color pick from that and know you have a solid palette.
Wow! This is actually crazy. Such a cool video. Not sure why this came into my feed, but I’m so glad it did. As someone who dabbles with paint, I found this absolutely fascinating. Great upload! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
awesome knowledge! I’ve been doing color picking by “moving in the direction of the color” I’m aiming for based on where I start in, or as you describe “leaning in”. I think I picked this up previously but don’t remember when/where. Good to reinforce that idea! thanks ☺️
I think this illusion holds mostly true for screens. If I am actually painting a sunset, I won't use orange-brown to paint the leaves. I'll use green and blend it with brown to make it darker or something.
@@subhrapratimsharma2825 thanks to smart phones it's pretty easy to study today. Although in paintings the effect is often pushed a bit because it tricks the eye into perceiving the light color more intensely.
Oh it suddenly makes sense, it reminds me of a theory that someone told me before… thank you so much anyway, it helps a lot!❤ (The whole thing is like “filter” function we always applied during photo editing🧐)
I think it was Mike Hoffman's painting tutorial where he pointed out that muddy color that can be used to tone the backgrounds. I guess it is clever thing.
when you painted that "purple" tree in the painting study my understanding of color was instantly flipped on its head so fast I couldn't help but laugh out loud and put my head in my hands. I could almost feel my brain rearranging
If you take a picture on the real world and see it from a unbalanced monitor, it will show a bunch of blues and greens by the nature of how blue biased our cameras and monitors are. But, if you change your white balance to a more neutral one and calibrate your monitor to show white color aproximating a very well lit white piece of paper (which will require to take out something like 30~40% of the blues from the monitor, perhaps some green/red as well) this will make that ilusion of yellowish grass being green a little bit more easily apparent. But yeah, besides this, grass and tree foliage on the real world is often yellowish. The third factor I wouldn't discart is that old paintings tend to yellow and darken a bit as they age, because of the oil paint getting yellow itself but also the varnish on top getting dirty and old. Sometimes at lot darker and warmer. So there is that too.
When I learned to paint back in the ‘80’s, on actual canvas with real paint, our instructor had us make a simple view finder. It was just a small square cut out of a playing card-sized piece of cardboard (I think it was black) and if you weren’t sure about the color of part of a still life you would just isolate that color by looking at that small spot through the view finder, usually about a foot or two away from your eye. You would then not be influenced by the surrounding colors. It was very helpful for truly seeing color while painting. I don’t think I would enjoy painting on a computer screen while looking at a digital image, but your idea seems similar to how I was taught. Does this work for trying to answer the blue dress or yellow dress question that was going around years ago? 🙂
this blows my mind! ive drawn and painted for years and always struggled with some aspects of colour but this explains it so well! is this something that could be applied to traditional art and if so how?
I always use the eyedropper tool to know what the actual color of my reference is. Judging the colors using my eyes alone is difficult as my brain plays tricks on me. A mountain with trees on a distance looks bright blue-green to me but my color sample says the color is actually gray. It is easier for me to paint because of the use of technology where I can color sample an reference for a more accurate color. I wonder how classic painters have come up with this knowledge by just observing and only using their eyes without the help of technology. It just amazes me.
I just don’t understand how, in that example painting, you’re saying that the bush in the far, far background is supposed to be looking like it’s purple. I don’t see purple at all. It just looks grey to me.
They are looking grey but they tend to lean toward a specific color, like a row of grey squares but each one is slightly different that the others, one might lean more toward red/orange as in it generally looks warm, while another one leans more toward blue/purple and looks cold, even though they are still in the grey area, so essentially your brain is tricking you into thinking the rock is a very desaturated color but it's probably just orange with other colors surrounding it. Or it's an issue with how your phone/computer displays colors, different screens display colors differently so when there is a minimal difference between colors you might have trouble seeing it on your device.
To go into the science a bit of why this happens - it's because of the way additive light colour mixing works. If you have a green object in an orange-lit scene, you may assume based on subtractive color mixing that you end up with a dark brown, but in reality they mostly cancel each other out, leaving you with a grey. And if the lighting is overpowering enough, that grey may even be tinted in the direction of the lighting. Then the second part of the puzzle comes into play as the video mentions, our brains adjust for this so we can still differentiate colours in different lighting scenarios. We see a grey in an orange scene, and our brain knows, that's likely a green. What's cool about this is you can apply it to color schemes for anything. Just pick one dominant color, then desaturate the other colours accordingly as if they were being washed out by the main color, and you'll end up with a cohesive color scheme.
