21-Draw-Illustrators-Guidebook-vol-2-ebook-(2021)

and Color Balance adjustment tools. I
often use these adjustment tools to subtly
change my character’s colors and make the
palette more unified. Hue, saturation, and
brightness allow you to adjust the same
three factors in determining color that
we talked about at the beginning of this
lesson. Color balance is a little different.
Color balance adjusts the color tone of the
current layer using three sliders: cyan/red,
magenta/green, and yellow/blue. Using
these sliders pushes and pulls color on your
canvas between each of the two tones. Both
options can be found in the Adjustments
menu on the top left toolbar.
CHECKING YOUR VALUES
You want to create good contrast with your
color choices. We see value or how light or
dark a color is most clearly in grayscale, but
that doesn’t mean we need to desaturate
colors to see values. To easily check if I’m
headed in the right direction with my color
choices, I create what I call a value check
layer. To do this, create a new layer above
all other layers and fill with white by using
the Fill tool (reviewed in Lesson 2). After the
layer is filled with white, open your layers
panel and tap the N on the layer you just
filled. Scroll down to the option that says
Color and your image should appear to
be grayscale. (This is what’s called a Layer
Blending Mode, but we’ll go more in depth
about this in Lesson 5.) Now that we can
see the values more clearly, we can check
contrast. Your goal is to have a variety of
lights and darks. Are there any colors you
chose that seem to be too similar in value?
If so, adjust using hue, saturation, and
brightness along with color balance for
better contrast. You can toggle this value
check layer on and off by checking and
unchecking the visibility box.
4
COLOR VARIATION
STEP 4: ADDING COLOR VARIATION
Once I’ve checked values and decided on
flat colors, I want to make these layers a little
more interesting by adding color variations
within those layers. I’ll add different color
tones in areas such as warmer tones on the
cheeks, nose, and ears or light and dark
tones in the hair.
I also start to think about lighting at this
step by adding subtle shadows where
elements are overlapping one another—for
example, under a character’s chin or where
clothing sits on the body. You don’t need
to go overly detailed with this process right
now since we’ll be adding more details later.
But I’ve found that adding color variation to
your flat colors gives your illustration a little
more life in these early stages.
DIGITAL DRAWING
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