Applying color theory

[Enkiel]

So i have a new Hordes army i want to start painting with very bright color (actually based on Wonka's Runts candy), and i really want to try applying color theory to this army, instead of going brownish like my Ogres and Dark Eldar...

Basically, there will be 5 skin color in the army ;

Yellow
Red
Orange
Purple
Green.

After some reading, i think i somewhat understand complementary color, but i really want to get people opinion before picking up brushes....

I started with Purple. Complementary is Yellow, which means ;
To shade purple, all i need is 2 part purple for 1 part yellow.
To highlight purple, i add yellow to pure purple as much as i want.

Is this correct?

If so, i'm a bit puzzled by Yellow.
Ok to darken yellow, i can go with a bit of purple, but how do i highlight?

Red and green? i mean, really? I can understand to shade, but to highlight?

Or does that mixt only work with shading? If that's so, how do i highlight colors? I dont want to just add white, as i want really vibrant color (and well, i wanna learn new stuff).

 

[QuietiManes]

I've only heard of people shading with the compliment. General rule of thumb, you want your mid-tone to be the colour you want that section to look like (if that makes sense). Then when your highlight and shade are brighter and darker and/or even different colours completely, it'll still look "right". So, what you can do (or what most folks do) is either use a white highlight, sparsely, or get yourself a brighter yellow to use as the highlight. If you mix white into the yellow to highlight it'll go pastel and that just doesn't work. Similar to red going pink. So, people tend to add yellow or orange to red, to highlight red. I think just about anything light would work to mix into purple for a highlight, red, orange, yellow, white. Adding white works for some colours, but there's usually a better option, along the same lines as shading by adding black, which would probably shade purple nicely.

Someone will probably come along shortly with better advice.

 

[Garshnak]

To truly understand colour theory, you must learn to understand how light on materials and colour vision works, which are, important to note, seperate things.

All those purported 'colour theory' websites you find around on the net often have simplified and sometimes even incorrect information on how things actually work, more giving accessible answers to actually rather complex problems.

If you truly want to understand, I'd suggest this website: http://www.handprint.com/LS/CVS/color.html
It's a long, hard read, but it's very learning and thorough. For some people it's even an eye opener and start seeing the world in a different way.

The whole 'mixing with the complementary' thing does work in some cases, but it doesn't really give you vibrant models (more muddy, as red+green for instance gives you brown, you don't want that). As you'll learn as well from that websites, that the colour wheel is arbitrary and only a quick reference tool for the budding artist, but it paints an incorrect picture of what the true complementaries are (some more than others) and doesn't really help you with shading and highlighting colours.

What complementaries however are good for to make your models look more vibrant, is putting the colours unmixed right next to each other. Some impressionist painters of the past have even used this principle by very finely outlining colour areas with their complementary. This can be done with minis as well, but since you have less area to work on and more viewing angles+interaction with light, it's a little trickier.
But there's great lessons to be learned from the old masters on how they achieved vibrancy in their colour. Things like the smoothness of a surface and the applied paint, the glossiness of a surface, the surrounding colours even the composition of the paint affects vibrancy.

And you'll also find by the way, that not all colours mix equally. Sometimes you'll require more or less from a single paint when mixing it with another, to get a colour that's exactly in between. This has mostly to do with pigment density.

To make a vibrant purple, you could go many ways, but none of them use yellow mixed into the purple (you can still use it unmixed however! Like right next to a specular highlight or subtly as an outline). You know, purple is often just violet desaturated and darkened with black right? Sometimes shifted to red as well. Depends on the paint company and name.
You can either shift the shadow/higlights towards blue or red (neighbouring colours! Not complementary colours!), using darker/brighter colours (with added black or white).
Naturally, the shadows would shift towards blue because that's the dominant colour of the secondary reflected light from the environment (the sky). But red can work as well, especially for organic materials like flesh (where the blood under the skin affects the colour), though in other cases that's a stylistic decision you need to make (as you need to be consistent in shading method all over the miniature to tie it together).
Red in the shadows of purple surfaces can make it appear brighter however, since red in itself is experienced a 'brighter' colour than blue because our eyes are more sensitive to it.

Anyway, there's more it to this, just go read that website, but I'm willing to answer any questions you still have.

(Now it's waiting to see if Einion will spot any flaws in my colour reasoning)

 

[Einion]

After some reading, i think i somewhat understand complementary color, but i really want to get people opinion before picking up brushes....

I started with Purple. Complementary is Yellow, which means ;
To shade purple, all i need is 2 part purple for 1 part yellow.

No and no. First off you need to find the correct oppositions* and second, visual complements don't necessarily work as mixing complements... you sometimes need to use both (#1 for colour schemes, #2 for mixing) but they're frequently not the same colours**.

Unfortunately when you look up colour theory you find a lot of stuff based on out-of-date info, in fact much of it is simply recycled old info.

*As I've mentioned before elsewhere, any wheel that doesn't show cyan or magenta is missing two key hues and as a result all the colour relationships are skewed.

**Many violet paints are actually neutralised best by greens!

To highlight purple, i add yellow to pure purple as much as i want.

And no. Often white will work okay but it depends on various things, including what colouration you want the highlights to be - bluer, more reddish, more than one colour; vivid or dull etc.

If so, i'm a bit puzzled by Yellow.
Ok to darken yellow, i can go with a bit of purple, but how do i highlight?

Usually just white.

Red and green? i mean, really? I can understand to shade, but to highlight?

Often white and yellow will work well, sometimes white will work okay. You might like how it looks just using yellow. You could also use a light flesh, sand or something similar.

It depends on the paint though. Remember this golden rule when painting: you're working with paints, not with colour in the abstract. This also applies to shading, where if you're assuming you use green for red and red for green that might not be right (totally depends on the paints themselves, what pigments they're made from).

Einion

 

[Einion]

Full colour wheel

Here's a rough colour wheel I created which you can use as a quick reference guide for correct hue oppositions:

This type of wheel is based on RGB and CMY, which are interconnected - one implies the other in a very direct way and they tie in together when it comes to the basic oppositions.

In comparison to older wheels based on red-yellow-blue primaries the key things to take notice of here are blue (violet-blue technically) faces yellow, green faces magenta not red, and red (scarlet) faces cyan not green.

Einion

 

[Enkiel]

well, am i happy or not to have asked before getting commited...

So when i was in bed last night, i though about my problem. So since my color are based on Wonka's Runt (Yellow is banana, Red is rasberry, Orange is... well... orange, purple is raisin and Green is apple), i though about raisin, and realized that to highlight my purple, a good idea would be a light red... correct?

I have 2 models to paint purple, so once that one is dealt with, i can concentrate on others...

Problem is that i sadly don't really have time to read (or even take classes) extensively on color... so after a few videos and reads, i was hoping to grasp enough of the basis just to get started....

 

[Einion]

i though about raisin, and realized that to highlight my purple, a good idea would be a light red... correct?

If you want reddish highlights, sure. Others prefer their highlights on violets to be slightly more blue. Totally up to you which way you go. But if you were aiming for something fairly realistic (the way purple things often look IRL) then you're usually aiming for the highlighting to be purple also.

Problem is that i sadly don't really have time to read (or even take classes) extensively on color... so after a few videos and reads, i was hoping to grasp enough of the basis just to get started....

Colour theory is a deep and wide subject but there's good news, and this'll come as a shock to a lot of people, you don't need to know any. Most of the great paintings done throughout history were created by people who knew nothing about what we consider primaries, complementary colour and the bulk of what we know about vision - this illustrates that technically all that is unnecessary.

You could just look at stuff you like, do your best to figure out what about the colouring it is that you like and work at copying/mimicking it.

Back to purple, if you do want the highlighting and shadowing to remain the same violet as the base colour one simple method is just to shade by adding a bit of black and highlight by adding white. This may give results that are a little dull for your taste, if so just thin your base colour and apply it as a glaze over the whole thing; this will make the highlighting more vividly purple and also handily helps smooth out your graduations.

Einion