How I Pick Colors

Art is about finding your way to convey emotions, atmosphere, and story through colors. There’s no “correct” way to choose colors––each artist has their own process and style! In this article, I'll be sharing my color workflow and preferences.

While some artists like muted palettes, others prefer bold, vibrant ones. Personally, I love high-saturation colors with a bright, optimistic atmosphere and subtle iridescent shifts. It brings a playful, dreamy, and anime-ish tone to my work, which is the kind of aesthetic I aim for. If you prefer a similar style, you're in luck: this article will provide insight on how I approach color!

Since this article focuses more on artistic decision making rather than real-world color logic, I highly recommend reading Color Theory 1 and Color Theory 2 first to build a foundation and understand color theory in depth.

1. My Color Workflow

Here's a quick overview of how I usually approach color in my illustrations.

Lay down the base colors: Once the sketch is in place, establish the local colors (the true color of a surface as seen in typical daylight) for each object.
Build a palette: Decide on the overall mood by choosing a palette and make sure the dominant colors work well together.
Increase contrast around the focal point: Adjust contrast along with lighting to guide the viewer's eye towards the most important part of the illustration.
Add color variation: Once the major color relationships are working, introduce hue shifts and atmospheric effects to make the painting feel richer and more natural.
Polish: Finally, use adjustment layers, decorative color accents, colored outlines, gradients, and other finishing touches to unify the illustration.

Although these steps often overlap, this is generally the order I follow. The rest of this article will explore the ideas behind each stage rather than following this exact sequence. So, let's take a closer look at the thinking behind my color choices!

2. Starting with Harmony

Before we start choosing colors, let's first define what color harmony means. Color harmony refers to a combination of colors that feels pleasing and cohesive to the eye. A harmonious piece is one where the colors don't fight for attention, but instead work together to create a sense of order, so no single color feels out of place.

The goal isn't to make the entire illustration equally colorful or attention grabbing. Instead, harmony builds a solid foundation for the painting. We don't want colors to distract viewers from the focal point, we want them to support it and make the rest of the illustration feel unified.

2a. Limit Your Palette

One of the easiest ways to achieve harmony is by limiting your palette.

In Color Theory 1, you learned about monochromatic, complementary, and analogous color schemes. These are excellent starting points because cohesive paintings rarely use every color available. Instead, they intentionally restrict the palette to support the mood of the piece. Using too many unrelated or high contrast colors can easily make an illustration feel chaotic if they aren't carefully treated.

So how do you know whether you've used too many colors? A trick I often use is simply blurring the artwork.

By blurring your painting, you temporarily stop focusing on the small details. After staring at your work for a long time, it's easy to develop tunnel vision, where you become fixated on individual brushstrokes or tiny adjustments. Blurring forces your eyes to see the illustration as a whole, providing a similar effect to zooming out on a digital canvas or stepping back from a traditional painting. It becomes much easier to judge the overall composition, value distribution, and color balance.

When I blur my own illustrations, they can usually be grouped into just two or three major color families. Although there are plenty of subtle hue shifts, they all belong to the same overall palette, so the illustration still feels unified.

The blur test is also a great way to catch mistakes. If every part of your painting is visually loud, or if your focal point no longer stands out after blurring, it may be a sign that you've introduced too many competing colors. This doesn't mean the artwork needs fewer colors, it could mean that it needs a clearer color hierarchy.

But what if you're unsure which colors to choose in the first place?

Color theory is always my starting point, but when I'm experimenting, I often rely on gradient maps.

A gradient map remaps the values in your painting from black and white to a custom color gradient. One workflow I like is to first paint a rough grayscale thumbnail, then apply a Gradient Map adjustment layer and experiment with different color combinations.

Instead of manually repainting the entire image every time, you can quickly test dozens of palettes in just a few minutes. Sometimes you’ll even stumble upon an unexpected color combination that works far better than what you originally had in mind!

2b. Color Ratio

Harmony isn't only about choosing colors, it's also about deciding how much of each color appears.

If you've studied graphic design, you've probably heard of the 60-30-10 Rule. It suggests dividing colors into three roles:

60% Dominant Color: Establish the overall mood.
30% Secondary Color: Support the dominant color and adds variation.
10% Accent Color: Draw attention to important areas.

Although this rule is commonly used in interior and graphic design, I find it surprisingly useful for illustration as well. Though I don't follow it strictly, I often think about color in terms of dominant, supporting, and accent roles.

The dominant color usually defines the emotional tone of the piece, while accent colors naturally become focal points because they appear much more sparingly. Next time you're developing a palette, try paying attention not only to which colors you choose, but also how much of each color you use.

3. Making Colors Feel Alive

Once you have your palette and know what colors each thing is going to be, the next thing to consider is hue variation.

3a. Hue Shifting

You might wonder: if we've already built a harmonious palette, won't adding more color variation ruin it? It certainly can, but only if it's done without intention.

Our eyes naturally organize color primarily by value (lightness and darkness). As long as the value relationships remain consistent, subtle hue shifts often won't break the harmony. Instead, they make colors feel richer and more natural. Think about something as simple as a white T-shirt. Depending on the lighting, the surrounding environment, reflections, and even your viewing angle, it rarely appears as one single shade of white. The same idea applies when painting.

I recommend starting with a flat base color, then introducing a soft gradient transition to give the subject a little more richness. It's a way to break up a solid color and make the subject feel more integrated with its lighting and environment. Instead of asking "What color is this object?", try asking "What color does this object appear under this lighting, in this environment, or next to this object?”

3b. Color Is Relative

This leads to another important idea: colors are relative to their surroundings.

We’ve briefly touched on this concept in Color Theory 2. In summary we rarely perceive colors in isolation. Instead, our brains constantly compare them with the colors surrounding them. In other words, our eyes are constantly adjusting as we observe the world. Under normal daylight, they subconsciously compensate for changes in lighting and surrounding hues to maintain what we perceive as "correct" colors.

Take the example below. The two circles are exactly the same color, yet the one on the deep blue background appears warmer, while the one on the bright yellow background appears cooler. Their surroundings change how we perceive them.

Understanding this phenomenon completely changed how I approach coloring. Instead of picking what I think is the "correct" color, I choose colors in relation to their surroundings.

For example, when painting shadows on pink hair, I rarely pick a pure blue. Instead, I desaturate the original pink and shift its hue slightly toward blue on the color wheel. Our eyes will still perceive the shadow as "blue", but because it's still closely related to the base color, the hair remains cohesive instead of looking patchy or disconnected.

Likewise, the exact same pink can appear noticeably warmer when surrounded by teal, even though the color itself hasn't changed.

Once you start thinking about colors in relation to one another instead of as isolated swatches, it becomes much easier to unify subjects of different colors within the same environment. Rather than forcing every object to match their local colors individually, you can subtly shift each color relative to its neighbors, creating a painting that feels much more cohesive.

3c. Light Effects

Here are two light effects that noticeably increase the richness of my illustrations: light falloff and subsurface scattering.

While two are often confused with one another, they're different phenomena.

Light falloff describes how light gradually loses intensity as it moves away from its source. This creates a gradual transition between areas of light and shadow, rather than an abrupt change.

Subsurface scattering, on the other hand, occurs when light passes through translucent materials like skin, hair, or wax. When light passes through thinner parts of these materials, they can appear brighter and sometimes take on a more saturated or warmer color.

One effect I like to exaggerate is the narrow transition between light and shadow. Rather than using a dull midtone, I'll often introduce a more saturated color along that edge to make the lighting feel more vibrant.

When I’m painting translucent materials, I like to add a similar effect: emphasize the light effect by introducing lighter or more saturated colors where light hits. Those subtle shifts can make the lighting much more believable.

3d. Atmosphere

Remember when we first talked about the importance of keeping your palette harmonious? Adding atmosphere is another great way to bring your colors together. By subtly introducing colors from the surrounding environment into different parts of your illustration, you can make unrelated objects feel like they belong in the same space. At the same time, atmospheric color can help separate objects from one another in a more natural and interesting way.

One of the easiest ways to understand atmospheric perspective is to think about fog. When objects become farther away, they're viewed through more air, dust, and moisture between them and our eyes. As a result, they gradually lose contrast, become less saturated, and shift toward the color of the surrounding atmosphere.

I like to exaggerate this effect in my illustrations to enhance the sense of depth. Rather than repainting distant objects entirely, I airbrush a low-opacity separation layer over areas I want to push farther back. The color of this layer depends on the environment––a cool blue outdoors, a warm orange during sunset, or any color that matches the overall lighting of the scene.

This step helps separate objects while making every element feel like it exists within the same atmosphere. Even a very subtle application can significantly improve depth and make the illustration feel more cohesive.

4. Directing the Eye with Contrast

Contrast is one of the strongest tools for controlling where people look. Our eyes naturally gravitate toward areas with the greatest visual difference. This can refer to differences in texture, scale, shape, and so much more. But for the purpose of color picking, we care more about differences in hue, saturation, and value. If your illustration has too little or too much variety in any of these factors with a lack of restraint and intention, the viewer won't know where to focus.

4a. Hue Contrast

Take another look at the example from earlier. Which version do you find hardest to read?

If you chose the middle image, you're experiencing exactly what I wanted to demonstrate. The character's pink hair blends too closely with the pink background, making the silhouette much harder to distinguish at first glance.

Based on the color for this piece, I would choose either the first or the last version. Both provide enough hue separation for the character to stand out while still maintaining the overall harmony of the palette.

4b. Value Contrast

Now let's remove color entirely and look only at the grayscale version. Which one is the easiest to read?

I consider the third image to have the strongest focal point.

By placing the highest contrast around the main subject, we help viewers immediately understand where to look. Strong value contrast also defines the silhouette more clearly, making the subject easier to recognize even before any details are visible.

Whenever I'm unsure whether my focal point is working, I often check the artwork in grayscale. If the subject doesn't stand out without color, chances are it won't stand out with color either.

4c. Saturation Contrast

Highly saturated colors immediately attract attention. Because of this, I usually reserve my strongest saturation for the focal point while keeping supporting areas more subdued. This creates a clear visual hierarchy without needing to add more detail. Another approach is to do the exact opposite: keep the entire illustration colorful while intentionally desaturating only the focal point. Although less common, this can create a striking effect when used with intention.

Another common mistake is making every part of the illustration equally saturated. When everything is loud, nothing stands out. The same thing applies to hue and value as well.

4. Thinking like a Designer

Once I'm happy with the overall painting, I move on to what I think of as the polishing stage. This is where I stop thinking about color realistically and start thinking like a designer.

Color doesn't only describe objects, it also strengthens composition, readability, and adds visual interest. These final touches are often subtle, but they're what help a painting feel polished and intentional.

Small graphic elements such as dots, gradients, sparkles, or decorative shapes can make an illustration feel much more lively. It can make things stand out less or more, to accent or to make things fade away in an interesting way. For example, I often add tiny high-saturation accents to create sparkling textures.

I also like using colored outlines or rim lights to separate objects. This improves readability while reinforcing the overall palette.

Finally, don't underestimate adjustment layers. Gradient maps, Curves, Color Balance, and other adjustments can help unify your illustration during the final polishing stage. Think of them as the final color grading step, similar to editing a photograph or film.

6. Breaking the Rules

We've covered quite a few ways to approach color throughout this article, I hope you've picked up something useful along the way. However, everything we've discussed so far should be treated as guidelines, not strict rules!

Sometimes I'll intentionally oversaturate a scene, add unnecessary color, or completely ignore realistic colors if it better communicates the mood I'm trying to achieve. At the end of the day, I don't believe the goal of color is realism. Instead, we should aim to communicate an idea clearly with intention, style, and readability.

The more you study color, the more you'll realize that every artist eventually develops their own visual language. Mine happens to lean toward bright, colorful, and slightly exaggerated palettes. Yours might be completely different, and that's exactly what makes art interesting!

So experiment. Observe the world around you. Study artists whose work inspires you. And most importantly, don't be afraid to break the rules once you understand why they exist.

References

熱帯植物 | 青い美学, カラーマップ, 風景. (2026, August 7). Pinterest. https://pin.it/6L0PTC0cK
(2026). Pinterest. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/2111131073724559/
Pastourmatzis, P. (2017). silhouette of trees covered by fog. In Unsplash.com. Unsplash. https://unsplash.com/photos/silhouette-of-trees-covered-by-fog-KT3WlrL_bsg