Introduction

When I first started studying/practicing color, one of these things always happened to me:

1) I chose certain colors that I thought would combine well to form a color palette, but none of the first attempts turned out pleasant.

2) I achieved a satisfactory result, but it took forever to find the right colors.

Colors are sometimes tricky, but who hasn't experienced that?

This time, I'll show you the process of a little trick I have up my sleeve for coloring in scenarios with a particular light (different from the blue sky and the default colors you usually use) with one of my OCs.

 

I will use CLIP STUDIO PAINT PRO and, as always, I will be detailing the brushes used throughout the tutorial.

 

*For a more complete follow-up of the process, I recommend watching my Speedpaint.

Concept Art

While it's true that the title of this tutorial is "Sketching like a Sloth," personally, I like to create some concept art to solidify my ideas and choose the best option.

Of course, this is like a complement to the tutorial. Concept art consists of lightly detailed sketches in a small section of the canvas.

These were the first ideas:

Ah, but don't worry! I haven't lied with the title. All the time we save on sketching, we will use for inking and coloring next.

Sketching like a Sloth I - How to Draw Different Flowers

Since I already have a clear idea, I just cleaned up the concept art sketch a bit and immediately continued with inking.

Now for the flowers:

For this illustration, both detail brushes (with a floral theme) and flowers drawn by ourselves will be used.

First, let's see how the flowers growing from the character's back are made:

It's important to recognize the basic shapes of the flowers you are going to draw. I have drawn daisies and white roses, and as you can see, these (and almost all flowers) can be formed from circles:

1) Daisies start from a circle divided into equal parts.

2) Roses have more triangular petals, but similarly start from a circle.

3) Tulips begin with a cylinder.

 

The important thing is the shape, as you can see in the previous image, the circle varies depending on the position. Once you understand that, the rest are just repetitive elements (like petals or leaves)

Sketching like a Sloth II - Tracing with Decorative Brushes

For the background flowers, just apply the brush that I will attach below:

Since the inking of this brush is different from the brush I use, I will freehand trace what the brush has drawn.

 

(*) I recommend tracing the content of the brush so that the composition looks unified. If your lineart style is similar to that of the brush, then this step will not be necessary.

And that's it! We now have the lineart of the image. Now all that's left is to color.

Coloring like a Spartan I - Defining Color Palette

To avoid "painting blind" on a separate canvas, or in this case, on our concept art, we will desaturate the colors to the maximum until it is in grayscale.

This step is important; the grayscale serves to check how much contrast there is between one element and another.

 

Now, with 2-3 colors of your preference on a new Overlay layer (In this example, I used yellow, green, and light blue), start brushing as you like (perhaps cool colors will determine the shadow or vice versa) and combine the layers.

 

It might seem a bit random, but this will create more variety of color gradients in the image as we add more colors, but it will be more visible later.

Then, in [Edit -> Tonal Correction -> Color Balance], you can edit the colors (based on which tones you want to highlight) if you don't like the first color combination.

In my case, it turned out like this:

Now, do you remember when I mentioned "default colors" at the beginning? These are the colors that artists usually paint 89% of the time.

 

They are shades seen in daylight.

 

We will use these colors, but not in a way that makes them look like daylight.

This is the logic:

1) Warm/light colors (from yellow to orange-red): [Multiply] layer, or similar effects

2) Cool/dark colors (blue tones): [Soft Light], [Overlay] (or similar effects) or [Color Burn] layer.

 

(*) This is not a fixed logic; you can also experiment and try different layer effects with different colors.

So, with orange color on the Multiply layer, we color the hair, and then the skin with its respective color:

Then, with a purple tone on the [Vivid Light] layer, we paint the entire canvas:

The tone changed, didn't it?

We saved the time it would have cost us to guess/experiment with which colors to use for shadows and highlights.

 

Also, you can always try other alternatives:

Coloring like a Spartan II - Color

Now that we have our color palette, all that's left is to paint our illustration using the eyedropper and the default "Soft watercolor" brush (which you can find in [Brush -> Watercolor -> Soft watercolor])

To color the leaves, we will apply "V"-shaped brushstrokes with two shades of dark green-bluish green. The darker tone is used to highlight the veins of the leaves:

And that's it!

Conclusions

I hope this has helped you!

 

Color is incredibly interesting to experiment with, but it doesn't hurt to take shortcuts once in a while, especially when you're not yet used to dealing with colors outside your comfort zone.

 

I will attach some of my social media links in case you're interested in seeing more of my drawings!

 

Thanks for reading!