>>25388 Black, red, and purple - sometimes camouflage

For the recent /bale/'s Pen2Pone, and some other drawings for mares, I use Canva's website for help with colors. https://www.canva.com/colors/color-wheel/ The basic gist of it, I wanted my (unnamed) pony to blend with the background, brown, so I input the code in the website and see colors that are tertiary (4) and make my art around them If you don't have a background, use the wheel to determine mane and fur color. If your pony has accessories and/or clothes, then style your pony with the colors. How about if you used all 4? And still have parts to color left? Get a color, and change it's saturation, hue, value but keep it close. That way it fits in with the particular object you're drawing, and blend in with the pony/art as a whole. Learning color theory is important. But as a starter, look at the wheel, draw something simple and see how it changes with different colors Hope this helps, and if anyone wants to add on or correct me, go ahead. We can all learn from each other and improve.

>>25388 I guess this isn't exactly related but sometimes IRL if I see a nice combination of colors (usually in nature, time of day) I go "wow, I wonder if I could make a pony like that"

I think the only real hard line rule is to avoid overly saturated colors. Even white ponies like Rarity and Celestia are actually off white. I'd describe it as trying to lean towards pastel colors, which to me makes sense since I assume little girls like pastel colors.

>>25398 I made this little draw to explain my thoughts. I'm also learning so take what I say with a grain of salt. I've found that working with patterns in your color wheel (color schemes) makes things much easier. What's more important though is to stick to your color schemes. Each pony might work fine on their own in pic related, but together they're a disaster because their pallets clash too much. >1 I used complementary colors (opposite side of the wheel) with a light value and a medium saturation to them here. The show typically follows this pattern for background ponies. To add to that they use a lot of secondary colors. I'd suggest this if you're looking for a pony that doesn't stand out too much. >2 I used a triadic color scheme here. It's useful if you want to give a background character a bit more importance. If you want a solid mane color, then I recommend giving them an accessory for you third color. >3 This is more of a main character design. I used purple to give a sinister aura to her. To emphasize this I kept the hue the same. >4 This is similar to 3, except I used analogous color scheme. The yellow brings out a very positive aura to her. >5 This is monochromatic. I typically don't use this, but it can be handy if you want to quickly fill in some background ponies. It's used a lot in anime. If you want to you can add a colored layer on top with a low opacity for example blue. This will give the impression that the background characters are sad, hopeless, or whatever your chosen color signifies. If you don't want to go full monochromatic an alternative is to just lower the saturation of your characters. >6 & 7 Over here I used white and black, but you might notice that they aren't pure white and black. The colors are a bit easier on the eyes that way. You can also match up the hue of the white and black using the color schemes discussed already. In both cases I use a complementary color scheme. White (which has a pink hue) goes with green, and black (which has a blue hue) goes with orange. You may also notice that I moved the saturation and value such that the mane is the reverse of the coat. Once again I'm working with patterns. >8 I had a bit of fun here to show you some things to avoid. Saturated colors, too many hues, and an undefined color scheme can give you a pony who's seen better days. Some final thoughts I'd like to give is that these rules aren't concrete, but they are a good starting point when designing a pony. Best of luck drawfren. (\^c^/)

>>25388 More anons should be recycling the ten gorillion pre-g4 toy designs if they're having trouble coming up with a unique OC https://www.strawberryreef.com/Index/Name/index.html

>>26004 >>26275 Okay, I can see what you guys mean. So would a scheme like this with a light or dark brown toolbelt/saddle to break up the blue work well enough?

>>26469 That looks good, but I'd switch the stripe in her mane for a lighter blue. It looks like you used the same color as the coat, which isn't the best idea. Having the same color next to itself can make your pony look a bit cheap. The brown saddle's a great idea to bring some personality to your pony though.

>>26549 >It looks like you used the same color as the coat Yeah, I did. Thought it would keep the colors concise. Here's a few more palette examples I did with the stripe changed up. The top three are with different shades of blue based on the body and mane colors, bottom two are using the opposite sides of the color wheel, also based on the body and mane colors.

>>26576 Good to know even on another site I can still go and forget to actually attach images.

>>25388 Here is the most dummy-proof method I've discovered. When I was analyzing colors of M6 in OkColor space, I've discovered that most of them are laying around 60-80 OkSaturation. So what you need to do is this: Step 1. Go to https://ok-color-picker.netlify.app/#5889e5 Step 2. Don't switch to OkHSV, use OkHSL. Step 3. Pick some saturation from 60 to 80. Step 4. Use Lightness slider to get both high value+low chroma colors AND low value+high chroma colors. Step 5. If you use complementary palette generator (like https://www.canva.com/colors/color-wheel/), pipe the result into OkColor picker to ensure that saturation is between 60 and 80 before getting it into drawing program. Step 6. Paste the HTML color-code from OkColorPicker into your drawing program. Step 7. ??? Step 8. Profit! I think it's a perfect Grug-friendly way to paint everything in a show-accurate way. In most basic case, you can fix saturation at 70 and still get all the colors you need, only bothering to change Lightness and Hue.

>>26469 Here is basic example of how your colors would look like if both were about 80 OkSaturation instead. (Yes, both tones have about the same OkSaturation in OkHSL here.)

>>26600 >>26603 Very interesting. This is definitely something I'll need to experiment with. The only real element to the colors I want to keep is the body being more vibrant so I'll see what I can do with that throughout the week. Thanks

>>26275 >White (which has a pink hue) >black (which has a blue hue) This is wrong. A monitor's black is not physical black. If your monitor is on, then it's emitting a color. When you tell it to display #000000, it does its best to display actual black (zero brightness; no electromagnetic waves), but it can't ever really get there. The darkest shades your monitor can make tend to be blue. A standard (i.e., sRGB) computer monitor represents colors as combinations of red, green, and blue light and has 256 shades of each. The shades don't behave the same: The darkest blue is darker than the darkest red, which is in turn darker than the darkest green. When you want your monitor to display a really dark scene, you're forced to use blues and avoid greens. Your monitor has even more trouble making dark shades in between these, like azure (which needs both green and blue) and brown (which needs both green and red). More modern displays (like digital movie projectors and 4K) are a lot better than traditional monitors in this respect, but even they have limitations. Your monitor also can't display white. One reason is that its colors don't get equally bright: Your monitor's #FFFFFF is actually slightly cyan. The other is that the color perceived as "white" depends on viewing conditions. Say you mount a TV in the middle of a blank wall. What looks white on the TV? It turns out to depend on the color of the wall. Something that's true white in the physical sense (equally powerful at all wavelengths of visible light) will be perceived as pink if it's against an sRGB #FFFFFF background. There are other, even more complicated effects, like the fact that your eyes and brain don't adapt to viewing conditions instantaneously. For example, when you go from bright noontime sun straight into a dark room, you'll see afterimages. The same effect happens, at a lower level, whenever viewing conditions change. Mostly, these are small effects. Traditional color theory is at a higher level than this, and what an art school might have taught 100 years ago is still applicable today. These kinds of details are most important when you have to reproduce something from one medium in another, like when you print a digital image. The colors you can make in print depends a lot on the process and can be wildly different from what you can do on your screen.

>>27046 That's a very well articulated, and factual reply.

>>25388 used adobe color picker in complementary till I had something I liked then I added another mane color.

>>25388 i pick colors that do not trigger the autism of 'this is sparkledog/edgy/shit' simple as

>>27115 This is the root of why I made the thread. I have to correct the mistakes the me of thirteen years ago made

>>26275 >8 That's just your average early fandom OC lol

>>27152 suffer, i guess, or provide examples and i'll try to help after i'm done hauling shit to the dump

>>27046 HDR + OLED screens piss on your wall of text HAHA

this site has helped me a bunch https://coolors.co/generate color picker is good too

>>27257 I did, that blue one up there is the palette, with >>26469 actually being my first attempt to reign in the colors from being so garishly bright. I do appreciate all the help and tools that have been posted

>>27297 the attempts have reined in the activation of the autism my job here is done

>>27300 God speed, anti-autism anon

>>27286 You think you're smart, but other color space standards have very similar issues. For example, BT.2020 (the 4K standard) has exactly the same problem with dark colors: The blue primary is darker than the red primary is darker than the green primary. And the relativity of perceptual white is a fact about human vision that will never change.

>>25388 Personally, I do grayscale first, then I use oklch.com to find my colors based on the grayscale value. encycolorpedia.com is also a good resource.

>>27423 Yeah so err regarding the colors white and black. Your computer can display them, otherwise you wouldnt recognize them.

Alright, I think I got some colors I'm satisfied with. It would just be a matter of deciding if I want the contrast stripe on the mane and tail, which would probably come down to how it looks with the saddle included. I also used the tools linked to pick out some eye colors.

>>27560 Your confusion will vanish if you read and understand a good textbook on the subject. I suggest: Fairchild, Mark D., Color Appearance Models, Third edition, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2013, ISBN 978-1-119-96703-3.