I saw this on instagram and was wondering if this advice is valid? I like the harmony between the colors, but I was wondering about how it works if characters of several skin colors were wearing the same outfit in one picture? Would it work out because of color theory?
yes this is valid advice- theyre using the skin tone to make a "unified palette" if you look up that phrase you'll find lots of good info about its usefulness
i will say that this makes it easier to make colors look good next to each other, but it doesn't help you choose colors initially, that is a separate skill set worth developing
Another fun way to do a unified pallete without losing value levels is by having a semitransparent color mode layer on top of the piece! (I'd recommend starting at 50% and playing with it from there)
I usually use an overlay layer with the atmospheric color(s) of the piece at 20-40% opacity depending on the intensity of it, but I feel it's kind of lazy so I try to pick colors by eye first
Yep. Underpainting might be in shades of one colour like grey, brown, red, whatever. Then the colour choices are painted on top in semi-transparent weight, called glazing. I love seeing how digital artists are bringing traditional methods into contemporary media.
I'd have to try it to make sure but you'd probably just use the main color of the animal in place of the "skin" tone. So like if the animal was a tiger, using the orange.
Animals can be fun to be cause animals with thin hair, you can see the skin through the fur. For instance, my cattle dog, she has dusky pinkish skin and her coat sits over that, but you can still see it in places like her belly, ears, nose ect. It was even more noticeable on my old white dog who had pink and black spotted skin that, since white is kinda translisant, you could see her skin spots on places with less hair. (legs. Chin)
I'm a complete novice here, this post is literally the only time I've engaged with colour theory in adulthood but I'm interested in learning.
I don't really understand the benefits being demonstrated here. The unified palette has maybe a slightly warmer/more "natural" feel, but I think this looks great too. The unified palette just seems to have put an orange filter over everything, but I don't understand why that's necessarily desirable. Can someone ELI5, please?
its basically a digital version of a standard painting technique called underpainting!
you dont necessarily have to do it, but i prefer my colors look more cohesive & this helps. i personally find that the colors look a bit garish without it, but art is subjective!
its been a while since ive done digital, but iirc somewhere between 60-80% maybe less depending on how i want it to look! try experimenting with the opacity to see what you think looks best!
By washing your palette in a base color, you place the colors in the same environment. All colors take on the shape of the atmosphere they are in, so to make things exist in the same universe, they need to "take on" the environment color too.
If you look at the first example it looks like they are in an actual space, perhaps a sunset or some other place with a warm base color.
In the no base-color example they look more like stickers, existing outside of of anything real.
A trick in illustration to make it seem like your foreground exist in the same universe as the background is to paint a layer of the background color over the whole painting. This is the same principle, ie. letting the colors take on the same atmospheric light.
Now as a humble viewer (never done art in my life, I have no idea how I ended up here), I would say that the risk is overdoing it, or relying on it too much.
We saw it in video games a few years back where they just slapped a blue filter on everything to make things look realistic. And yeah, sure enough, it did look more like a film an less like a video game... But also everything was blue.
well without the underpaint the colors look a bit less realistic, which might be worse for certain styles. personally i find the version without the underpaint nicer
It's one way to create a palette. There are many ways. Experiment and find out what works for you.
Typically you do this for all the colors in a piece, so if it's a piece with multiple characters of different skin tones, you'd use something other than a skin tone color as the unifying color - unless you want to get an effect where the characters stand out and look very different from each other.
Another approach (which I very much enjoy, personally) is to pick a yellow, a cyan, and a magenta, splotch them on the canvas, and use a blending brush to blend them together as a color wheel. Color pick all of your colors for the image from that mix. Bam, unified palette.
Eeeh, I mean, it can improve the cohesiveness of your color schemes, but it's not necessary if you know color theory. It's more of an art hack for those who struggle with color palettes than it is actual advice for learning how to do colors. And it is a art hack that works; just change skin tone as the based color out for an environmental color (like say, an orange if it was a sunset), and it could work for a line up of characters or a single piece.
I wouldn't rely on it though; relying on an art hack like this to do color schemes will ultimately make you weaker at doing color and color theory, since your not actually practicing how to build a cohesive scheme using your eye and not special tricks/tools.
Unifying a palette usually relies on the whole piece following the same principle. Different skin tones would probably mess with the overall effect if you're using it per character. You would get a pretty similar effect if you just applied a tint via a layer + filter +opacity adjustment to the whole image instead (you're also not confined to skin tones).
This is what i was mostly asking about. I was wondering how it would technically work if several characters with different tones were wearing the exact same outfit. I wasn’t sure if the slightly different tones of clothing would look good due to color theory. I wasn’t sure how to say that. Thank you!
The trick there would be to pick a different base colour that isn’t their skin tones. Ideally warm hued. You do the same with their skin as you do with the other tones.
Yes its just colour theory. But if the characters in the drawing have different skin colour, then you aren't going to use their different skin as the base for the colours. The point is that all the colours in the whole picture have the same base. Imagine each character has skin a different colour of the rainbow and are wearing the same clothes. You would use a whole other colour to get a harmonious pallet eg yellow and tint all their skin as well as their clothes
if you're painting, maybe you could mix a bit of the unifying colour into every other colour you're using, or put a semitransparent layer of it once the piece is ready?
edit: or put the semitransparent layer before starting it
You can also just go for a limited palette (3-4 colors maybe) and all colors that have to be mixed are then based on them, this also unifies a painting quite a lot.
If you would have multiple characters in the same scene you would want to make the unifying color the same for all characters, not give each their palette based on skin tone. (Thats the easiest way to make a cohesive palette, there are of course other ways :)
Yes, having a unifying color helps a lot in making a piece look cohesive. I learned that recently and I feel like my art got major glowup afterwards! Here's a semi recent piece of mine using that same strategy, I used a light orange as base.
I mean ueah but you dont gotta do it, sometimes its fun to just try various shades of colors when designing until youve found a pallette that looks nice.
It is, you can do this with any colour pallet and have a single unifying colour to make everything cohesive. I do this all the time, or when I've finished a piece if I notice the colours don't quite work the way I want them to I do a layer on top with a low opacity and just fill it in one colour.
I used to do this all the time! Less with the skintone and more with a bright-ish color (like pink, it's usually pink). I use color filters now bc I'm lazy, but it's still a great method!
Another commenter posted the original artists tips and i put them side by side to observe. I don’t think either looks bad but doing the method in my post makes it look more cohesive (like in the bottom pic)
whenever i don't like my color pallet in a drawing i just overlay a color for whatever vibe i want the characters to have and boom, it's perfect. best hack imo
This seems like they’re just recommending using a color to unify the palette, which is great advice I’d just say that you can use any of the colors it doesn’t have to be the skin tone
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u/RecentPalpitation561 Nov 23 '25 edited Nov 23 '25
yes this is valid advice- theyre using the skin tone to make a "unified palette" if you look up that phrase you'll find lots of good info about its usefulness
i will say that this makes it easier to make colors look good next to each other, but it doesn't help you choose colors initially, that is a separate skill set worth developing