Intro

Decided to try your hand at adding more color to your characters? Well, here are some tips that will help you create a beautiful character illustration with highly saturated colors and contrasts.

Tip 1: Search for your Color Palette

If you’re just starting to learn, color theory may be a new thing to you, and even when you’re a pro, sometimes it’s a hassle finding the right colors you want. My suggestion is look for a pallette, whether by a certain color or an aesthetic.

 

It’s as simple as searching for “colorful palette” on Pinterest. But of course there is the matter of choosing which palette.

 

Initially I wanted something that had the color yellow in it, because it’s a very bright color that I rarely use and I wated to get out of my comfort zone. Then I looked at the pose I already had which is a person looking up at the sky. So, this led me to choosing something that had blues, pinks, and purples to show something like a twillight sky.

 

So, in the end I found this color combination:

Tip 2: Turn the Saturation Up

While it’s a good palette, the saturation wasn’t to my liking so, if you want to increase the saturation, go to the upper part of the screen and click Layer. Go to New Correction Layer and select Hue/Saturation/Luminosity.

A window will pop up letting you adjust the Hue, Saturation and Luminosity. In this case, I only wanted to adjust the Saturation so I turned it up to 50.

Now that that’s done, your previous palette feels a little more vivid in color.

Tip 3: Flats and Color Combos

Before anything I start with the skin tone base, then I draw the clothes going off on what color contrasts better.

 

In this case, I wanted my character to have dark skin, so I color in the base first.

And because bright colors contrast really well with dark skin, I’m using the lighter shades from my palette, from which I used yellow for the sweater and blue for the hair. Had this character had light skin, I might have used the darker purple and pink to provide better contrast.

Now that I have my base colors, they don’t really provide the colorful design I want. So, what I’m going to do is take the pink and purple from my palette (again, the lighter versions) and mix it with the base colors. For this part, I chose to mix the pink with the yellow and the purple with the blue.

 

Be sure to lock the pixels for the layers and paint the color in using the shadow brush to the desired areas. For this case, it was the sleeves of the sweater and the lower half of the hair.

Tip 4: Darken the Lines, Add Make Up

Darkening the lines is something optional, but it’s an effect along the lines of Pop Art, it helps create a hint of depth. For this, I’m using the Turnip Pen and just darkening a few crevices here and there, nothing too drastic because I want the colors to stand out more than the black areas.

Now you will notice I added makeup and a small accessory. This is because the face was looking a little bland compared to the hair and sweater. So, for these small areas I used the darker colors so that the contrast wouldn’t be too high.

 

And much like makeup in real life, it really helps bring out the features.

Tip 5: Use Masks and Different Blendings Modes to Shade

Now we can start with shading and lighting.

 

For this step I always add my shading layers in another folder in which I will set the blending mode to Through. This is just to keep better track of the shading layers and the blending mode will ensure anything in this folder will affect the folder below.

Now in order to add a lighting layer, add a Raster Layer and color it completely using one of your palette colors. In this case I used lighter purple color, then set the Blending mode to Soft Light.

Now you can see there is a purple hue to the entire image.

Now, to add a shading layer, create another Soft Light layer above this one, but this time you will create a selection and add a mask.

To create a selection, do a right click on the folder containing your flats, go to Selection from Layer then click Create Selection.

Now that the selection is created, select the new Soft Layer for your shades and click on the Create Layer Mask icon.

This will create a mask layer where once you start shading, it will only affect the previously selected area.

Now you can fill in the shadows, this time with the darker purple.

Tip 6: Add Image Background and Adjust Lighting

For the background I used this Image material asset.

 

Content ID: 1694220

By WANRAM

Because the background is a little dark than I want, I adjusted the Saturation and the Hue.

 

In this case, I turned the Saturation all the way to 100 and the Hue to 24.

Tip 7: Add Effects and Highlights

Create a layer above your shading layer and change the blending mode to Add (Glow).

Here I added subtle highlights using the Soft Brush, nothing too bright since the lighting doesn’t call for it.

And finally I used the Space Brush to add stars/stardust effect.

 

Content ID：1774467

By: GlimmerGuts

Conclusion

Creating colorful character illustrations doesn’t require you to study hours upon hours of color theory. While it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn it, sometimes you just have to try your hand with different palettes and use the many tools Clip Studio has to offer to bring your character to life.