In depth Cohesive colours
Clip Studio Paint & Photoshop
Illustrator Lim Wei Lun shares his expert advice on how to make gorgeous character art with a cohesive colour palette
When we talk about striking colours in our art, it’s not always about being bold and bright, but can come from using a palette that sits together as a cohesive whole and enables greater storytelling.
That was vital when creating this piece. I was aiming to portray the sadness of the character, which is why I decided to work with a mostly monochrome colour scheme, and yet still keen to maintain a vibrant and united palette.
For this tutorial, I’ll be sharing my process and tips on my workflow, including an explanation of how I choose and blend colours to achieve a cohesive and lively final artwork. To accentuate this point, the piece features a largely neutral set of base colours to show that you can still achieve a striking palette even when you’re working with a predominantly monochromatic scheme.
In addition, I’ll also make use of mood lighting to help convey that feeling of sadness in the illustration, as changing up the way we light the character can create vastly different feelings in the viewer. Finally, I also want to talk you through some of the cinematographic techniques that I personally like to use, such as effects like chromatic aberration, blur and bloom, plus some noise textures to bring my illustration to a more polished final look.
1 Sketching and line work
I’ll be using this sketch to explain my workflow to you. We’ll start with Clip Studio Paint and then do the final touches in Photoshop. I find using Real G-Pen creates the best lines for sketching and line work, as you can control the line weight using pen pressure and it creates very clean, textured lines. My workflow doesn’t involve doing clean line-art, as I tend to prefer a more sketchy look when we get to the final illustration.
2 Character blockout and layer separation
Next I’ll prepare the sketch for the colour phase by blocking out each individual part into their own layers. This makes it easier to manage your colour layers. The above-right image shows a visualisation of the layer separation using different values for each layer.
3 Plan the lighting
Next I want to decide on how I’d like my scene to be lit. For this particular piece, I wanted the light source to be coming slightly from the front and right of the character. This allows me to light the character in an interesting and dynamic way, as shown. I want
