How to Make Your Art Pop

How to Make Your Art Pop

Has your art been looking dull lately? I certainly felt mine was, that is, until I overcame that hurdle and discovered what was actually missing. Some vibrancy in my colors!

As seen in the illustrations below, I went from darker, desaturated colors to more vibrant ones.

While still keeping the original style and rendering, most changes were made to the base colors. As you can see, even a simple shift in colors can have a drastic impact on how eye-catching your art is. So here are the simplified thought processes that I followed to make my art pop.

If you’re still starting, don't overcomplicate; begin with a color scheme with two main colors. This is easier for practice and gives clear distinction to the subject. In the example below, vivid red and lavender are the main colors of the illustration.

Using colors closer to each other on the color wheel gives off a more cohesive look to the art.

Meanwhile, using complementary colors like magenta and green, or blue and orange, creates more contrast in your illustration.

Value contrast is often used to separate the subject from the background and the elements in front of the subject. When learning about values, we are taught that the closer a color is to black, the darker its value is.

But increasing saturation can also darken a color’s value. To demonstrate, we will look at the color triangle. As shown in the example, as the color moves from white to the more pigmented side of the triangle, its value also darkens.

Knowing this, we can use the more pigmented color to act as our darker color.

Note that our eyes perceive blues and purples as darker than yellows and greens, which can be used to create value separation while still using saturated colors.

Additionally, yellow and blue are opposite colors on the color wheel and are great for contrast!

It’s hard to manually pick saturated colors while maintaining values right off the bat, but using layer modes makes this process easier and simpler.

In the sketch below, I will use yellow for my character and purple for the background. As mentioned before, yellow is lighter than purple in values, making it easier to have a clear distinction between the subject and the background before you render.

Start with your base colors.

I usually start by applying a Multiply or Burn layer to the character, with a color picked from the background, to create cohesion between the subject and the background. This is usually done at 15% to 20% opacity.

Then, with my color of choice, which is yellow for this example as mentioned, I use Overlay on the whole character. I adjust the opacity of the Overlay layer based on how bright I wanted the character to be.

You can then render while still staying close to your color of choice.

This method can also be used on less saturated pieces, as shown below. The Multiply layer has higher opacity than the Overlay, unlike the previous example where the Burn layer has higher opacity than the Overlay.

Before you work on your full illustrations, I recommend making small thumbnails first to see if you're satisfied with the colors you chose without feeling overwhelmed by details.

Keep checking on your values with a white layer set to the Layer Mode “Color” on top of your illustration. This allows you to catch and fix issues with value early on, when you're much less hesitant to make drastic changes than in the final stages of an illustration.

Try to use warmer colors for the base of the subject at first, as they tend to be brighter than the cooler tones. While a blue undertone can work, you have to consciously reintroduce the illusion of blood flow beneath the skin, especially with warm human skin tones.

Finally, a small exercise to train your eye is to create small thumbnails with blobs for your subjects. Then choose one thumbnail and experiment with different colors to see which version catches your attention the most!

And there you have it! Once you start messing with layer modes, pushing up your saturation, and getting the hang of picking base colors, you've got the foundations down for making your art stand out!