Weekly Update (And Tutorial!) // Identifying Color Issues In My Art!

Weekly Update / August 18, 2021.

This Weekly Update is kind of like a tutorial!

While trying to make my art warmer and higher quality, as I posted in my last Weekly Update, I learned I had a pretty serious problem with my colors.

The colors I use a lot have interesting saturation and value issues I am now learning about.

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I apologize for the setbacks and slow art right now.
I am in the middle of learning a lot about art and trying my best to improve!
Getting a solid foundation down is necessary for me to have quality, speedier art without a lot of stress!

I will share with everyone here what I am learning and how I am getting over some art hurdles!
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1) What issues am I having?

Turns out the higher the saturation with pinks, purples and sometimes green, the darker the values.

This means the more I tried to warm up and make my colors more vibrant, the darker I was actually making them. 

This was breaking the values in my art and kinda ruining it.

Value is the lightness or darkness of a color (left side of the color picker).
Saturation is the "intensity" of a color (right side of the color picker).

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2) Value and saturation are weird.

Some colors are darker the more saturated they are, while other colors are not.

Pretty much all colors I use in my Annie art project have darker value the higher the saturation.

As shown here, high saturation blue and pink can be much darker in value than yellow.

The more I was lightening up characters like Miriam the Mirror Goat in my art, the "darker" she was getting. 

It really confused me! I could tell my art was "wrong" but not how or why until I figured this value issue out.

How to fix this?

I am just painting in less saturated colors over my characters and backgrounds to balance the values out while checking my values as I paint.

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3) How to check values in your art!

Now I will show the best ways to check the values in your art!

The most accurate and useful way to check values is only in Photoshop:

This lets you press "Ctrl + Y" to flip back and forth between color and values at any time!
This is what I am doing now!

Another way to check with slightly less accurate results is to make a new layer, fill it with white and set it to "color". This can be done in other art programs outside of Photoshop.

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I got most of this info from this YouTube video once I identified values as the main issue I was having and looked it up!

The video will do a better job than me of explaining all this, ha ha~

I wanted to try teaching it myself, though.
I have heard the best way to reinforce knowledge is to teach it yourself!

Hopefully writing all this out will be helpful to some here and help me understand this better so I can make the best art I can!