COMMUNICATION II: Smoke And Mirrors

COMMUNICATION II: Smoke and Mirrors

Everything has lost its meaning, I had to let it go/ To find myself, myself, and start something new, brand new/ Forced to look deep in the mirror, to face who I really am

Now it’s just me

Hi, my name is Vape, and I'm addicted to wraiths

Casual Sombra messing with Gabe

Nothin’ but sad bois

Kavinsky's Nightcall plays somewhere in the distance

I reaaaaaally like the color pink, first and foremost, lol, but it’s also much easier for me to work with super saturated colors. They kinda soothe my mind for lack of a better word. I'm very picky on colors since certain ones (forest green, brick red for example) kinda give me a headache to look at. As far as advice, I included a layer breakdown of one of my more recent drawings to give you an idea of how I tweak the colors. I use CSP, so some of this stuff’ll be different in other programs. I also included a list of layer effects and how I use them. In terms of palettes, it can take me anywhere from 20 min to couple hours worth of experimenting to strike a balance. You basically just have to play with different layer types, shadows, and contrasts. I try to establish a mood and base palette before jumping into adding shadows and stuff. It makes stuff way easier to keep track of. Most of what I do is work with complimentary pairs, which is the fancy way of saying colors that are on the opposite side of the wheel from one another. An easy way to start is to establish your BG color first. Like, for this draw I based the whole palette around that yellow-green. So, Gabe’s mostly pink and purple since those are complimentary to yellow/yellow-green. And since his base colors are warm, I used cooler colors for shadows, which helps make the warm tones of his skin/coat pop. The biggest advice I can give for vaporwave/80s/super saturated palettes is to not be afraid of the colors. Magentas and teals can be kinda intimidating at first, but after you play with them for a little bit, they’re fairly easy to work with. You just have to remember that the important thing is balancing the palette instead of keeping things super accurate to real life. I hope this helps!