i-m-a-g-i-n-efx-august

Workshops
Core Skills: Part 6
Manage colour
tools in rebelle
Martin Hanschild concludes his series on Rebelle by taking a look
at working with the program’s colours tools and preset options
Artist
ProFile
Martin
Hanschild
location:
Czech Republic
Martin is a 2D and 3D
character designer
who works in Prague for
motion art house Eallin.
www.hanschild.com
When painting
traditionally, you start
with a limited set of
colours, but you can
achieve a full spectrum
of hues by mixing them. In contrast,
painting digitally gives you a full set
of colours from the moment you
select File>New, no mixing required.
Sometimes it’s useful to adopt a
traditional approach to digital art
and begin a painting with only a
specific set of colours. Rebelle’s Color
Sets are a great tool here: they enable
you to organise and store colours in
a group, and also sort them by colour
moods. This isn’t useful just to group
your most commonly used colours. It
also makes it straightforward to work
with a limited range of hues – ideal
for practice exercises (working just
with shades of grey, brown and so
on, for example) or painting specific
situations where certain colours are
dominant (dawn or dusk, say). And
as you’d expect, Rebelle enables you
to mix colours and create new hues,
much as in traditional painting.
One thing that Rebelle lacks when
compared to other painting programs
is advanced colour management
options. However, you can now save
your artwork as a PSD, enabling you
to make final colour corrections
(and, eventually, prepare for print) in
Photoshop. In most respects Rebelle’s
colour tools work in much the same
way as other painting programs, as
you’ll soon find out. I’ll also mention
colour tracing of reference images,
which is an interesting way to create
a quick base for later work.
In the Color panel
menu, you can
turn on sliders
and switch
between RGB
and HSL mode.
If you want to
tweak saturation
or brightness
while preserving
the hue, use the
HSL sliders.
I use shortcuts mostly for changing
Saturation and Brightness values.
If you need to set a
specific colour with a
code number – using
a colour’s Hex code for
a website, say – click a
colour in the upper left
corner of the Color
panel, and a new Select
Color window appears
with a System Color
Palette. Now copy the
colour code and click
Add to Custom Colors.
The Color Palette
1
In the Color Palette menu, you can choose between a
colour wheel and a square colour palette (which is similar to
Photoshop’s Color Picker). I prefer to use the circular palette,
because it’s much faster to choose a colour. I can easily change
the hue or choose the colour complementary to the selected
colour from the opposite side of the circle.
You can set the sensitivity of the adjustments in Preferences.
Colour sliders
2
You can change HSL values by using either the slider or keyboard
shortcuts. Go to Preferences>Keyboard>Color and set your own shortcuts for
increase/decreasing Hue, Saturation and Lightness. Make sure you choose to
apply this to HSL colour mode – otherwise, it’ll affect RGB values, too.
84 August 2017