One weird Contrast tip (artists hate)

Disclaimer

I am not an artist. I am not trained. I am a nerd who watched too many colour theory videos when painting warhammer.

Colour theory

Colour theory is kinda big, and kinda complicated. Look at all these charts and graphs. Oh my, a triadic colour scheme you say? mmm yes let me just get out my colour dictionary to see if that is allowed by the colour laws.

Can we make it simpler

I’ve found one fairly simple thing that I think kinda covers all of colour theory

Contrast Manipulation

Theory: To make art look good all you need to do is manipulate contrast. That’s it.

What is contrast?

Contrast is where some colours stand out when next to other colours. I’ll use black and white for now to keep things simple. Look, this white on black is big contrast, this dark grey on black is low contrast. Contrast is where two colours look very different

How can you use contrast?

This is the half of the CRUX of this talk (included early )

Contrast is a TOOL that you use to CONTROL PEOPLE’S ATTENTION

Look at this big picture. I bet you all noticed the white dot first. That’s the thing that jumps out the most, it attracts your attention, because it has BIG CONTRAST

Here’s another picture with LOTS of contrast. My god it’s ugly. It is HIDEOUS. So MUCH CONTRAST.

Now look at it again with most of the contrast reduced except for some specific points.

Much nicer to look at.

How do you make things look good?

This is the second half of the CRUX of this talk.

Something looks BAD when it attracts your attention to the WRONG THINGS or to TOO MANY things.

If you have LOTS of contrast EVERYWHERE it is too much, and looks bad.

But if you make sure to have LOW contrast everywhere it looks ok.

Then if you have a few SMALL areas of high contrast, those really POP, and the thing generally looks good.

The CRUX of this talk

• Contrast is a tool that controls people’s attention
• Pointing people’s attention at 10% of an image looks good, but pointing it at 90% looks bad

So if you want something to look good, you want like 70% low contrast, 30 high contrast.

More about contrast

So far I’ve only used black on white to show examples of contrast but there are several different kinds of contrast

Value contrast

This is white to black. Basically how BRIGHT a colour is

Hue contrast

This is where the colour wheel comes in. Green contrasts a LOT with red, but not much with Teal.

Saturations contrast

This is a combination of the first two. Big saturation is where the colour is very vibrant. LOTS of hue means lots of hue contrast. Small saturation is where the colour is quite dull. LOW hue contrast. This lets you have lots of different colours without them contrasting too much where you don’t want it.

Final examples

Here are some examples of contrast being used in different artwork (mostly warhammer minis)

With examples of ugly minis that I explain away using contrast then examples of BEAUTIFUL minis that I ALSO explain are beautiful because of contrast.