A Study In Greens, Variety in Your Colors
By Neil Blevins
Created On: Apr 14th 2002
Updated On: June 1st 2005
Looking at my artwork, you may notice that I usually enjoy the use
of
similar colors in a piece. For example, a color scheme of yellows /
oranges / reds, or maybe light blue / dark blue / purple. But even with
similar
colors, I always try to add variety and variation in their hue to keep
the eye
interested.
And doing that also adds realism to your piece.
Color choice helps add mood to a scene as well. In fact, on larger
productions,
some companies have people who are devoted to picking the color palette
for a particular shot or sequence to make sure the overall look conveys
the right feel to the audience. Color theory is a vast subject, for
this
tutorial, I'm just going to pick one small lesson that I was taught the
first few years I attended art classes with Canadian Wildlife painter
Renate
Heidersdorf. I was very lucky to get a place in one of her classes
when
I was 6 years old, and I continued going to those classes until I was
23.
Every year in the fall, classes started out with us doing a nature
piece
of some kind. When I was like 7 or 8, we did the following, first, open
the ink that was called "Green". Place it on the paper. Observe the
color. Probably medium brightness, not quite neon, but very generic.

Then in the next 20 minutes we had to mix on the paper 20 different
greens.
Green with yellow mixed in. Green with blue. Green with brown. Dark
greens,
light greens, Lime greens. As many greens as we could find.

The
purpose of the exercise was to realize that just because this ink was
called
"green" does not mean it should be used to paint anything we know to be
"green".
Once we finished this exercise, we then started out by painting a
nature
scene of some sort. And of course, we were expected to use lots of
different
greens, different greens for different trees, grass and plants.
The Rules
Now, it may seem odd to have small children follow a rule like this,
"No premade green is allowed in your painting". But in fact, it is not
a rule as much as a method of breaking the rules. When we are small and
are holding our first crayon, we have total freedom. If we want to make
the sky green, we can make the sky green. I mean, why not, if that's
how
our minds see the sky. But soon afterwards, we start looking to our
parents
for answers to our questions. Such as, "what color is that tree?'
"Well,
it's green". "What color is that grass?" "It's green." "What color is
that
car?" "It's green". Pretty soon, we have all the answers we need, all
of
these things are now categorized, they are all green. So no wonder when
a person starts painting, they immediately reach for that generic green
to paint their grass and trees. After all, they're all green, this
paint
jar says green, so I should paint it green.
This is the difference between painting what you see and what you
know.
In the book "Mass" by John
Harris, he explains how he had a teacher who was convinced that is
was more important to paint what you saw then what you knew. As in,
forget
that you know what that object is, paint the lights, paint the darks,
paint
the color, paint the shapes, and eventually the object will just take
care
of itself. Try this as an exercise sometime, find something and try
painting
what you actually see vs what you know the object looks like. Your
observation
skills will multiply in no time.
And of course, one of the first things you'll notice is that "hey,
the
green in that leaf is not the same as the green in this leaf." Or "This
shadow makes this green darker than the green of this leaf in the
light."
All of a sudden you see how the object really looks outside of what we
expect it to look like.
The Natural World
Lets take a few shots of the natural world. Here's a patch of ivy,
notice
the huge variety of greens, some leaves are light, some are dark. Some
are in shadow...

Even upon close inspection, the leaves themselves are different
colors,
with veins and spots and other detail, many, many different greens.

And here's a lovely garden scene, plenty of different greens there,
I've picked a few of the colors and placed them on the right side for
you with Photoshop's color picker.

Lets Make Some Grass
Following these ideas, lets make some grass.
Below is a picture of my grass, with a generic green color. Ok, looks
good, but
there's
something missing. The eye sorta gets lost in the grass, since it's all
the same bland color.

Fortunately, most plugins of this kind probably gives you users some
options as far as color goes. For example, you can use a map to specify
the color of the blades of grass. Here's a map, imagine this projected
from above the grass. When a blade of grass grows, it chooses it's
color
based on the color of this image at the position the grass is growing.
So if it grows from a pixel that's black, the grass itself will be
black
at that point.

And here's the map applied to the grass. Notice how this adds
variety
and ends up being more pleasing to the eye, as well as more realistic.

And here's some real grass, notice the variety in greens...

Of course, depending on what you're trying to do, single color grass
may be the goal, such as a more cartoony kind of grass, but if you go
this
route it should be a conscious choice based on a style. A common
mistake
when you just start out is to make everything the same color, not
because
you want that but just because it didn't occur to you to do anything
else.
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