Loish

TUTORIAL // avoiding muddy colors

Added 2025-09-05 15:00:00 +0000 UTC

This month’s tutorial is on avoiding muddy colors! This is a problem that so many artists struggle with, and there are so many things you can do to prevent it from happening. It’s all about choosing the right colors, and making sure you blend them properly! That sounds easier said than done, but in this video, I’ll show you exactly how you can do that ✨

The main brushes I use in this video are:

The hard round brush from my own brush set for blending and painting
My own smudge brushes to smudge - find them at the bottom of this post
The MaCaLabs HB pencil brush for the initial pre-prepared sketch (there's also a Procreate version)

Here's the artwork I made in the demo:

Here are some additional tutorials I've made in the past that would be a great supplement to this one:

Choosing colors: A great resource to understand midtone control.
Creating vibrant skintones: This tutorial touches on similar topics, but with a focus on skintones specifically. It’s all about making your character exude life and warmth!
Colors: common mistakes: This is a tutorial where I paint over your submissions to correct mistakes that happen during the process, and also elaborates on how to ‘fix’ muddy colors once they come up.

Here's a cheat sheet with the most important information from the video - you can also find a PDF version with clickable links attached to this post!

I hope you enjoy this video ! Feel free to share any future tutorial suggestions in the #tutorial-suggestions channel in the discord server (If you don't know how to join, just follow the steps outlined here) or leave them in a comment below ❤