Pixel Art & Colour Theory Strikes back!

Yo pixel champ in the making, lets crack into some more info and techniques to use in our art why not?

Colour Ramps

a colour ramp is a pallet of colours arranged by their hue and luminosity values, creating an easily discernible set of colours for you to use:

Above is the pallet i chose and bellow i have arranged them into a colour ramp. There is still an error in this ramp though all the colours are arranged by luminosity, but in the lower ramp the green hue clashes with the other colours in the ramp, if you were to use it in an image it would not look nice. to create a nice ramp like the top one the hue of the colours should not be random but follow from one to the next

The most important thing about a colour ramp is that it helps you balance your pallet and space out your values evenly, a pallet with varying ratios of relative distance from hue to hue, or luminosity to luminosity will often look quite poor and take away from your art.

Hue Shifting 

Now we understand how to create a colour ramp hue shifting is super easy to grasp, basicly as your luminescence value raises up the ramp you shift the colour to a lighter hue ( refer to cheat notes ) or a darker value the lower it goes, just remember as with your ramp keeping the relative values constant will yield a greater result.

Workflows

Some Commonly used workflows when working with colour:

Grey scale to Hue

As the name suggests you start by just adding in values of black and white till your image is ready for colour, then decide your pallet by replacing greys with your chosen hue value mixed with luminescence and saturation value of that gray.

Painting In Layers

Start by picking your pallet, each colour will be assigned its own layer, starting with the darkest layer you lay down the base of the image moving up layer by layer, tone by tone until you have placed in all the values.

Add as you go

This method is similar to the last but as you find yourself needing more colours for highlights, shadows you add in extra colours to your pallet. This can be a bit dangerous unless you understand colour theory well, as each colour added throws off more micro conections to each other colour in the scene and you will need to alter the relations of a few if not all of the colours in the scene.

That's all for this post,

Smell ya later.