[Tut] How I choose colors (SPRITES)

[Gespenst]

Marko asked "Did you take those colors from some reference or you choosed them yourself? If you did choosed them yourself, do you have some tips?"
http://www.lf-empire.de/forum/showthread...#pid198372

Here is the answer.

Sometimes I create my own or sometimes I borrow some.

CHOOSING MY OWN COLORS
Every artist got it's own style and with style comes everything else, line width, color saturation and their combinations, object they prefer to show on the sheet of paper. And now we are talking about colors.
Talking about sprites, I actualy prefer to make them look alive. By alive I mean make them warm and not cold, because if cold means dead/blue/pale(?) and warm means alive/red...check someone's body. But that does not mean that dark side will be blue and bright side will be red. It means that we will be going towards one or another but not going away from our base color. I am not the only one who does something like that too.

Alright.
This is on what I will be working.

It's colored. Light and dark colors but wait. Is that me or something about this one looks dull?
Indeed. It bit lacks of warm and cold colors variation. Take a note. If you are facing the sun. Some of your body areas gets brighter and warmer because of the "sun beams" but the part of your body which sun is cooler. So in this case it's the same.

Now let's look at "color-fixed" sprite I made.

Now, what I did here. I added some color variety. Instead of red dark, base, light colors I added red=dark, orange=base, yellow=light but ofcourse I went from orange to a bit of red and from orange to a bit of yellow to create such effect.

Here is the example of it.
Base color.

As you can see it only matters that if it would now be plain black or white and if you want to add some shades.

Light color. Yellowish

As you seen in previous image. Base color on the hue scale is 20. And light color is 30 on the hue scale, which is yellowish. This adds some warm feeling, am I right? And also some extra contrast. For saturation all I did was decreasing it by 20 (depends on you). By decreasing saturation you make it loose it's full color by making it go pale. I like doing that because for light colors decreasing saturation makes them look brighter. Don't decrease saturation too much or don't decrease it when your base color is dark or not light because that will make your color go grey instead of bright. As for value, I also increased it because I want my color to stay yellow while making it less saturated.

Dark color. Redish

Light colors is 30 on hue scale and base color is 20. Since it goes darker, we should go for a cold color or atsleast towards cold colors but not too much. So 10 will do the trick. It's red but not too red, more like orange red. Also increased saturation makes the color look sharper and darker. Like when you go in the darkness, you try being sharp. Value was decreased a bit because saturation did the trick and also red is darker than yellow.
In this way I finished the rest of the sprite. Metalic shading is similar but sometimes can go more towards warm or cold color but that depends on you.

So that's it. Any questions?
If I remember something, I will update this tutorial.

//Also, increasing and decreasing saturation might help. In real life you could say that shadows adds some grey to the color but while making sprites, I want my sprites to be beautiful, colorful and be nice to your eyes. No neon high saturated colors unless design requires it.