Color Harmony Made Simple! - Exclusive Tutorial

On July 09 2017 05:58 Glider wrote:
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ok here are a few things to note:

1) color combination only plays a partial role of our aesthetic feeling toward an image or person, and is ultimately subjective (but the theory does apply to majority, if you only thinking about color)

For example you could be someone that really really likes purple hair on a girl. When that happens, what color her cloth is, other less vibrant color in the hair, is less important in your eyes. A girl you have a crush on could be wear sunglasses that clash with her hair all day and she will still look amazing to you. In your picture there is a lot of other context at play beyond just color, If you were to just put blocks of color next to each other it would be a more color oriented test. So it's not so much as it works on hair (although in this picture it plays a part, but you wouldn't see someone dye their hair with vibrant brown and pink), more because all that extra context de-emphasize color effect a lot. also 2 other small points relating to that:

a) the difference in nature of hair and clothe puts distance between the two colors if u were referring to that. (see my image below, the bottom row, your mind pairs up the color and valuate their combination effect much more strongly than your picture, since we group clothe together, and hair further away from clothe)

b) the brown in your picture is not a very strong vibrant color (not sure if u are talking about the brown in her hair or clothe), neither is her hair in general, especially the shadowy part that's pretty much black at the top. The transition and low vibrancy decreases any color effect. (compare to 6 at very bottom right). You can test it out further by using mspaint and manually paint her hair as brown then purple, or purple, then her clothe brown, and you can see what a difference it makes. So it's not so much that it works, it's other effects like contrast, transition, context etc that makes the clash much less noticeable.

It is subjective, but majority of people probably would not pick 6 as their favorite combination. My guess would be 3, 4, 1 looks ok to most, 5 is not clashing but the color might be too dull/boring for some (and brown isn't exactly a pretty girly color - nothing against UPS), 1 is fairly generic and people might like it or dislike it a bit but majority shouldn't have too big of a problem with it. 4 is not clashing but might be a bit too vibrant for some.

the top I just played with a few different combos for fun to show due to more context and low vibrancy the difference is not nearly as much as bot. Tho I did increase the vibrancy on her cloth/hair a bit in mid bot, and you can feel its' a bit more unnatural and clash a bit stronger. By comparison you can see your picture's hair do have a lot of dark brown, black, dark grey, red with purple tips. It is still definitely purple hair but there is actually a good bit of orange, brown, natural red in the the hair (only that picture wise), but they are very dark and transition is smooth, which comes back down to contrast and vibrancy again. You can test around use Photoshop eye dropper.

all that context + lack of color vibrancy + smooth transition, serves to de-emphasize color combo effect a lot.



I mean I was in middle of a project and you see all these super heroes, and I dunno consciously or not, the suits/hair abide by the principle for almost all of them. Skin tone is skin tone, and as mentioned in video, pure yellow, blue, actually are neutral and can go with each other and other colors, especially other neutral colors.



now because it's a comic image so vibrancy is super high.. blue yellow, blue natural red are two big combos. Try to focus on characters with more than one color (aside from skin tone, but sometimes even skin tone abides the rules). Mystic in the front, blue skin, purple hair, dark blue /black clothe. Rogue, neutral green slightly toward yellow, yellow under dress and yellow hair (silver part is neutral). Even that random face in the middle, purple hair, pale pink skin. Cyclops, brown hair, yellow gear, red / bright yellow part in middle. Hawkeye, blue, purple. Venom on the front right, blue/dark purple, with tongue that's leaning blue-ish red. Iron fist, orange jacket/ yellow head band. w/e girl that is in front of him, mostly blue hair, cloth, and even grey-blue skin.

some big guys in the back, right side, Galactus , blue cloth, pink and red/pink helmet. The guy to his left a bit, all yellowish with gold armor. Very left back (thanos?) purple. I mean I'm sure if one look hard enough they might find some opposite examples, but we can see 90% of those are in line.