The Basics of Colour Theory

Good afternoon all!


Now then, I've been mentioning colour theory a little bit over the last few days, so I thought I'd do a post explaining at least the basics of it. 

Now then, as you can see, this colour theory is based on an RYB (Red Yellow Blue) colour wheel. Red, Yellow and Blue being the primary colours, are the largest circles, the second largest you get by mixing the primaries and are therefore called secondary colours (Green, Purple, Violet, Dark Orange and Yellow-Orange). The smallest circles, are tertiary colours and you get those by mixing either primaries or secondaries.

Colour theory is a method of choosing colours that look good with each other, and more importantly, a way of avoiding colours that do not look good together. There are various ways of choosing harmonious colours, which I've shown in the image.

Basic complimentary colours are those that are directly opposite each other on the wheel, these are extremely high contrast. It is important to remember that even though the colours do compliment each other you do not have to ensure that the colours are used in equal amounts, rather choose one main colour and use the other to compliment it, for example in details or lighting etc. You can also use another pair of complimentary colours, as long as they are within 2 spaces of the currently used colours (Analogous).

Split complimentary colours are very similar, except instead of picking colours directly opposite, you choose one colour and then the 2 colours either side of the colour directly opposite (see image). You can choose any of the colours as your main colour in your scheme, and again, they do not have to be equally balanced.

The analogous colour scheme uses 3 touching colours on the colour wheel, they are therefore very low in contrast. This is often used when a specific colour is wanted to dominate a theme, the analogous colours can be used to to pick out details etc without distracting too much from the main colour. Commonly used in the design stage of characters and sets etc.

The tertiary colour scheme (my personal favourite) uses 3 colours equally spaced around the colour wheel (6 colours apart). This is much less colour restrictive than the other schemes as all 3 colours are so different. Again, often used in the design stages of characters and sets, when a dominating colour is not in the brief.

An important note, colours such as pastels that are lowly saturated (all near neutral colours), do not necessarily need to adhere to colour theory and can be used freely with each other.e

Here is a .png version of the colour wheel, you can import this into your drawing application to quickly pick up colours from.

On another note, I took a better look at my use of blog labels, noticing that they are not used as search tags as on other sites, rather a way to categorize your posts. I've had a little clean up of my labels, so you can now use the labels box at the top right to view posts that you're interested in seeing! 

Until next time! Mat

Hair Do Boompage!

Another day, another ludicrous lie-in... I blame it on the cold that I still have! 


A brand new idea for another 3 minute dawned on me in bad last night, it's still very much in the budding stage, but it's about a pirate girl. I decided to throw together a hair do style-page, not sure that any of them will be the final design, but any I should upload pretty much all development work I do. Keep in mind that the face is just a generic girl face I sketched out, not the definite face of the character:

I actually really like this hair effect, I do it using the same hard-round brush I use for sketching, with opacity and flow set to pen pressure. 


If I had to choose any of the above hair styles it would probably be the top right one, or perhaps the bottom right with the top right's bangs... Another page is needed I feel...
I'm currently also still working on the colour theory blog, but it's raid night tonight so I thought I'd better get something uploaded to keep up this daily streak I've got going!


Oh, short story for you to explain the use of the word 'boompage'. A few years back I was doing some very quick sketches, jotting down ideas and couldn't remember the word 'stylesheet' so just saved it as 'boompage', I of course immediately remembered it was called a style sheet, but boompage has kind of stuck! (I did say it was a short story, and I didn't say it was going to be particularly interesting). So now you know, any stylesheets I do, will probably be titled and labelled as boompage.


Anyway, until tomorrow: good-bye, aloha, auf wiedersehen, arrivederci, au revoir, adeus, and all that jazz!

Alien Sketch Cleanup

I admit I got a little carried away last night and today!


Last night I spent a few hours, creating a bunch of backgrounds to import into all my concepts, I'm trying to get away from the plan white backgrounds... Though I'll probably still use fairly plain backgrounds for simple concept sketches.

After I'd created quite a few variations of backgrounds, in various colours. I started playing around with ideas for a more professional looking ratworks signature; the kind that you see on concept studio's. I notice that a lot of studios use the whole name in the signature, not just the logo, and often find a way of incorporating the logo into the name.


I had a play around with some fonts, and some layout ideas, the rat standing on the w in ratworks for example, in the end I found one that I really like... Though I know rob wasn't expecting any changes like this, but now at least we have a choice of which signature to use, I admit I do like the 'stamp' logo we already use, but for more finished looking work I think I'll use this one.

 I'm still working on a decent looking presentation for how I actually arrived at this, and I should have that uploaded in a few days!

In other news, today I decided to try my first finished drawing, and I must say I'm pleased with how he looks finished! I spent about 3-4 hours on this today, I got a little carried away experimenting with a new painting technique I decided to try out. Usually, I spend a long time 'inking' all of the lines in, for a cartoony look, then block in the colours, and then shade. On this I went straight from the sketch (exactly as I uploaded it the other day) to painting and shading straight ontop. The resulting .psd file had a LOT of layers, but I think the finished look is worth the effort (and trauma to my computer's memory). Here's the pic:

The blogspot resizing makes it look a little fuzzy, so please do fullview! The blobs in the top left are the colours I picked using colour theory, these are tertiary complimentary colours. I should really do a blog on the basics of Colour Theory, which I'm still very much in the process of learning.

Until next time! Matty out!

Getting closer with the alien...

As the title says; I did a really quick sketch today of my alien, and have taken quite a liking to the design of this one.

I want a cartoony looking alien, but not one so generic as in my previous sketch. Started out with a tiny thumbnail for a quick idea of build and pose, and then just sketched around it; a very quick and seemingly very effective way of quickly coming up with ideas.

Also thought id add a quick splash of colour... There hasn't been very much so far has there?
I'm sure that will change when I'm slightly closer to having finished designs.


Hope this alien is a little more to your liking Robear... Have you got any suggestions? 

Still suffering from this man-flu (cold), hope it goes before my holiday...

Matty out!

Guards! Guards!

Afternoon all!

A fairly productive day today, got a full beginning middle and end for my guardsman idea, so that's 2 of 3 3 minute ideas all done and dusted, apart from concepts, sketches, research and a presentation... Ok so I have a lot of work to do!


In other news I'm suffering from a pretty nasty cold at the moment, it's one of those colds that's bad enough to be a huge drain and an all-round inconvenience, but not bad enough for me to think that it's flu. All the flu symptoms are there... But I'm getting on with my day, so it must not be flu! The start of the uni year is fast approaching however, having some semblance of a deadline is a huge motivator and my work-rate has noticeably increased at last! (2 blogs in 2 days! I know right?!)

Anyway, the reason for this blog is to show the basic concept sketches I did today for my guards idea, so here they are:

 

 

I already love this new brush! The first image I was trying to get some ideas visualized, it probably makes a lot more sense to me... But hopefully I'll be able to sketch up a finished looking example frame to get an idea of what I actually intend it to look like. The second image is a character conceptual page, I really had no idea how I wanted the guard character to look, he needs to look slightly pathetic, but not totally unlovable.


I found that a great way to get some quick ideas for characters is to very very quickly draw silhouette character thumbnails, the actual silhouette of a character has a huge effect on the appearance, certainly the immediate impression the character gives, so it's a great great great starting point for character design. Plus, the character in this film is (at least at the moment) going to be shown entirely as a silhouette anyway!

I'm really not sure if I should publish my actual idea on the blog, so until I've discussed it in detail with Rob and Jud, I'll just stick to uploading the research and design side of things, not the story side (sorry).


Extra kudos to you if you got the Terry Pratchett reference in the title!

Matty out!

Quickfire Portraits

Hello all!

Kicked into action once again by Rob uploading and making me feel lazy!
I was going to do some speed life drawing like he did, but instead decided to go for speed portraits. So I quickly gathered up a bunch of character portraits (some you may recognize) and started sketching quickly from them.

This was just an exercise for me to get a little reminder of proportion of faces, my cartoony sketching has, I admit, warped my drawing habits. For example, I noticed that I was actually creating much smaller chins / jaws than what is correct proportion (particularly on women). 


Another quick helpful tidbit mostly aimed at Rob:
A way to save yourself some time when 'signing' in photoshop.
1. Open up the logo you sign with.
2. Using the magic wand (w) select the blank space around the image, also select the spaces inside letters are selected etc.
3. Go to Select > Select Inverse. Your logo should now be entirely selected.
4. Now go to Edit > Define Brush Preset, and select a name for your new brush.


Now your logo will forever live inside your brushes panel, so you can quickly select it, size it as you like and re-colour it with ease. It also doesn't add as much to your file size as importing the actual image.


Enjoy! 


Next time; sketches from my newest idea. All about guards!

Vancouver Film School (VFS)

While browsing the internets for animations, particularly on youtube I find myself coming across a lot of films from the Vancouver Film School (VFS). The quality of these videos really stand out to me, mostly 3D animation, they are all finished to a very high standard. 


I thought I would share with you some of my favourites that I've seen. 

This one is my favourite so far; 'Decency' by Dongkun Yoon, the simple character design and cartoony style allow for very exaggerated animation and expression, while keeping it still believable. I also thought that the voice acting was pretty decent (sound is so often overlooked in animation (one of my biggest problems at the moment) and it has a huge effect on the film). I didn't care for the cruelty in the film, I would have preferred the taller character to have stood up for the frog rather than giving into peer pressure, though I sense the point of the animation was to invoke sympathy for the frog.

This one called 'Border' by Bastian Van Rooden is another great one, the idea itself is simple and the way the film plays out is entertaining. Characterizing a standard object can be a tricky job and I think he did a great job. Extra kudos for the 'Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy' reference at 2:22, I love finding little reference like that in movies and games!

'Space Pop' by Rafael Graça Teixeira is a simple but funny film. The strength of this film is in the animation, the various happenings in the film cause the character to make some very varied movements such as swimming and 'doggy paddling'. Though there isn't really much of a story there, I believe this would make a great film for a show reel as it showcases a lot of skills; lighting, expressions and varied animations, which I hope we'll be able to squeeze into our film next year. 

I'm fairly certain that this could be the film school which Robear mentioned to me last year, I'm extremely impressed by the quality of some of the films coming out of that school. Would definitely be a good investment of a year, if only I could afford the fees. More info on their site here.