rendering.

[battlebattle]

ive always had problems with rendering when color comes into play.
i am by no means a master of light and shadow especially when throwing color. im ok enough at them where i can draw a picture and youd believe it without too much problem.

if you asked me to draw a human face and use a pencil i can do it almost effortlessly.

if you ask me to do it digitally and use black and white i can still do it convincingly, but it wont look as good as if i just built up dark values with a pencil.

if you asked me to do it digitally, erase the lines after ive blocked it in, then just "render" with light and shadow... its almost like everything i know just shuts down.

what is my problem here?
its difficult for me to even "study" it because while i can mirror a photo i see to varying degrees of success once it gets to that part where its just colors on colors my mind just locks up.

its annoying.. i can look at my hand and see all of the science of light behind it i just cant do it.... with color.

why?


(edit)
actually ill do a quick picture on photoshop and ill render it while keeping my lines and post it.
then ill do a version where i erase the lines and try to render it without "lines"

[thespirals]

practice by really looking at things....train your eye to really see the colors...there are a lot more colors in everything then it may appear. sometimes it helps to use your color picker and just scan across an image and see what colors pop up....i think it's easier to see this in painter's color palette then photoshop's. you will be surprised what colors things actually are.
also, colors look different when they are next to other colors as opposed to being isolated as a single color.
what helps in making things look realistic is to use a lot of colors all over the place. painter's color palette really helps with this too, you can choose a value, and then just move the ring around the rainbow wheel to get lots of variation throughout an image.
when you don't do this, things appear really flat.

also a good general rule is using saturated colors for the lights with desaturated colors for the shadows or vice versa....and also warm opposite cool.
also a lot of variation is value is good......i used to have a pretty low contrast in my old paintings, and when i started to really push the values more then i originally thought would be good, it made my paintings look a lot more crisp.

oh yeah, and squinting at things to see the blocked shapes will help with painting as opposed to drawing with lines. maybe also try drawing something with lines, and put an outline around where the blocked shape would be...to see....then paint inside those lines a solid value shape

[JFierce]

You said your good with black and white, well grayscale is just the values, you then just need to focus on grabbing the hue and saturation properly (and chroma). If you think your off, convert your image to grayscale real quick to check the values, then revert it and work based on what you noticed. If your values are set the colors seem to be a bit flexible.

But I'm not an expert I just remember a good artist on here saying you paint with value foremost.


Obviously you should study a lot from life because that's observing how color truly interacts and appears. You'll get info for that you can't in a photo.